Hello forum members, as I was going about my day, I couldn't help but notice media reporting about a new study which seems to ring right back to the subject of height and how important it is for dating. It seems to have found that, over the last 100 years and in 69 countries,
men’s gains in height and weight are more than double those of women’s, increasing sexual size dimorphism.
Furthermore, the study concludes:
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.
I'm not yet fully sure after glimpsing over the study whether sexual selection seems to indeed by a main factor according to the author's interpretation, so perhaps someone else could share there views on the study's validity and what conclusion we can draw?
The sexy and formidable male body: men’s height and weight are condition-dependent, sexually selected traits
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Topic: Men have grown in height twice as much as women, possibly due to sexual selectio (Read 255 times)