Men have grown twice as much as women over past century, study shows "in the UK, men’s height gains were 2.76 times larger than women’s in the first half of the twentieth century"

uniterofrealms_ · 2025-01-24T12:41:59+00:00

emb4rassingStuffacct · 2025-01-25T23:27:37+00:00

I think Dr. David Buss (evolutionary psychologist) put it well when he said that men are mostly the product of a breeding experiment by women.

When girls that aren’t even 5’5 are nearly demanding that men be 6’+, we’re gonna get stuff like this 😂

PriestKingofMinos · 2025-01-23T21:34:01+00:00

4. Discussion

Our cross-national analyses suggest that as the social and ecological conditions of nations improve, including reductions in overall disease burden [17], people’s height and weight increase, but more than twice as much in men as in women resulting in greater SSD. It is possible that this sex difference is confounded by population differences in maximum potential height under optimal living conditions, and thus our estimates of the rate of height increase with increasing HDI may be biased upward. However, any such bias is not likely to be substantive, given that the same pattern emerged in our within-nation analysis—in the UK, men’s height gains were 2.76 times larger than women’s in the first half of the twentieth century, where over 90% of the population at that time was White European [26]. Other studies confirm substantive within-nation effects: Nigerian men who have grown up in nutritionally stressed regions are 7.5 cm shorter than their better-nourished peers, whereas women are just 3.2 cm shorter [27].

As predicted, in our across-country analyses inter-individual variation in height was lower in countries with better living conditions, but there was not our hypothesized difference in this relationship between men and women. The within-country (UK) pattern, however, yielded our hypothesized sex differences, with larger decreases in variation for men than women as living conditions improved. The reasons for the different cross-country and within-country effects are not yet clear but might be explained by greater noise in the across-country data due to variation between nations and will require follow-up studies. Variability in weight was actually greater in nations with higher HDIs, and this might be explained by richer countries having access to more energy-dense processed foods enabling considerable weight gain by select individuals, although we partially controlled for this by excluding individuals who would be considered obese (BMI > 30).

Based on our main finding of SSD being greater in more favourable environments, it is clear that the development and maintenance of gross morphology is more sensitive to living conditions in men than in women, at least in terms of height and weight. Similarly, for example, to the horns of the ibex [28], men’s height and weight fluctuate with developmental conditions in ways consistent with a sexually selected condition-dependent trait [3,11]. More practically, our results confirm Tanner’s [10] proposal that height is a useful biomarker for assessing population health. We add to this by showing that men’s height and the SSD in height are particularly sensitive to early conditions and may be especially useful biomarkers for tracking population changes in health and for assessing population-level SSDs for other traits, including those that typically favour women [3,11]. At the same time, our results need to be interpreted with caution given their correlational nature and followed up with longitudinal studies that track cohorts varying in early exposure to stressors.

Menthkurta · 2025-01-23T21:30:18+00:00

Definitely, where I’m from women are still 5’6” and most young men are above 6’2”.

TheMammothKing · 2025-01-26T08:15:03+00:00

Sexual selection or nah?

Comments

4. Discussion