While I was doing research for the article on what would be considered the optimum or “perfect” height difference or height ratio for heterosexual couples, I came across this PubMed study.

The results are actually not what I would expect but is still very interesting.

As for men, there is clear evidence that taller than average in height men have more reproductive success. The study “Evolutionary fitness: Tall men have more reproductive success” basically put a nail on the coffin on that issue. There is no arguing over this claim or societal phenomena. Not only that, it is found that women may actually want an even taller male for mating or sex during certain times of their menstraul cycle, when they are the most fertile due to wanting to have healthier and taller babies which is told to them by their reptilian brain and instincts. The study “Women’s height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans.” put a nail in the coffin also for this discussion. Women during certain times of the month want taller, more masculine men since their body, evolution, nature, and their instinct tell them so at some biological subconscious level. So for men, it seems that to really have high reproductive success, it is not just enough to be “tall” but “even taller”.

Analysis & Interpretation

The first thing that is slightly off what I would initially think was the claim “Men do not use stature as a positive mate-choice criterion as women do.” this means that when making a mating choice, men don’t put as much emphasis on the women’s height/size as the women would. A tall men is equally willing to date, marry, and mate with a short female as a tall female. Inverse, both the tall and short females tend to lean toward the taller male, while both lean away from the shorter men. This results in what the researchers call sexual dimorphism, which means that the height differences between the two sexes are here to stay and probably won’t converging in the middle and cause the height difference to be removed.

The fact is that we already know that females who are too short or too tall have less reproductive success. That is easy to understand since traditionally, extreme stature in either of the two ends indicates some genetic pathology. I had expected that overall, the slightly taller in height women would have more reproductive success than the  slightly shorter than average female but that is not true.

Let’s just use some general correlations to reach this conclusion. In general, people or families who are more well off in more developed, more modern countries are taller. Richer people in general are taller than shorter people, due to many different reasons from diet and psychological issues probably. However, we also know that richer people are probably more careful with their money and how to invest and allocate capital. This means that richer or better off people from the more developed countries would have less children. We remember that many young woman from southern African nations, Bangladesh, Paksitan, India, or the Philippines which might be considered more of a developing nations have realtively large families with many children, around the 3-6 children range. However, they are from these nations where the conditions means that they are probably not as tall as their female counterparts in more developed nations like Denmark and Sweden. From these two correlation, then we can see that due to poverty and lower quality of life conditions alone, there is a connection between the fact that the women is shorter than the average height of women in the world, and having more children. While the young woman in Canada may be 5′ 6″ and have 2.1 children, the woman in the Philippines is probably more like 5′ 3″ with 3.5 kids. This shows the phenomena to match the studies numbers, since more kids is how most census makers and anthropologists would define evolutionary or reproductive success. If a women has more kids, she is more successful evolutionarily, assuming of course all her children live to adulthood and manage to reproduce/ have children on their own. Thus, we have shown that indeed, shorter than average females are indeed more sucessfull reproductively than their taller than average in height peers.

Proc Biol Sci. 2002 Sep 22;269(1503):1919-23.

Women’s height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans.