Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/science/natural-selection-may-help-account-for-dutch-height-advantage.html

by kazuya • 11 years ago

35 44 11 years ago

mobile.nytimes.com

chrismealy• 11 years ago

A Dutch friend tells me it's all the hormones Dutch farmers use. Anybody know if that's the case?

thisjepisje• 11 years ago

Sounds like a monkey sandwich story to me.

pimlottc• 11 years ago

I have never heard of a monkey sandwich story but I would really like to hear one.

iagooar• 11 years ago

I am not saying I believe in it, but in the past I heard more than once that Dutch were one of the first nations to add more additives to their food and that's why they are this tall.

Also, Dutch people are not the only ones to get taller and taller: even in southern European countries the young generations are experiencing a huge height boost.

dba7dba2• 11 years ago

Same with S Korea. New generation kids are significantly taller than just 1-2 generations ago.

EliRivers• 11 years ago

I suspect that the reason South Korean children are taller than they were two generations ago is that two generations ago not having enough food to eat was a real problem in South Korea.

Someone4• 11 years ago

Unlikely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_hormone_controversy:

In the 1990s, in the midst of the mad cow disease crisis, the European Union banned the import of meat that contained artificial beef hormones. […] Until 1980, the use of growth hormones, both endogenous and exogenous, was completely prohibited in (as noted above) Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Greece.

fragsworth• 11 years ago

Great, this article's title suggests that they've discovered a selective pressure on the Dutch to be taller, but then says they have no idea what that selective pressure might be. At the very end of the article, even:

Dr. Govindaraju said it was too early to speculate on why some populations are evolving in different ways.

Wtf?

pbreit• 11 years ago

Is there any other possible reason for such a thing?

phpnode• 11 years ago

Possibly diet. Obviously it's anecdotal but all of the Dutch people I know consume far more dairy products than those from the UK.

Edit: Turns out the Dutch are the third biggest consumers of milk per capita in the world[0], looking at the list of "tallest" countries on wikipedia[1], there seems to be a great deal of overlap at the top of the two lists. I wonder if a secondary factor could also be related to vitamin D exposure, but I couldn't find a data source for that.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Average_height_around...

return0• 11 years ago

But the dutch don't eat so much. What about people of dutch descend living elsewhere?

staunch3• 11 years ago

Over 2,000 years ago Julius Caesar described the people that lived where The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany are today.

They do not live much on corn, but subsist for the most part on milk and flesh, and are much [engaged] in hunting; which circumstance must, by the nature of their food, and by their daily exercise and the freedom of their life (for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination), both promote their strength and render them men of vast stature of body.

http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.4.4.html

scarmig• 11 years ago

Genetic drift? Sexual selection? Excess height as a spandrel that comes with improved nutrition?

chrischen• 11 years ago

Yea but better nutrition is enjoyed by most first world countries.

jusben1369• 11 years ago

Perhaps they've always been taller and were suppressed by two world wars and famine etc and have since bounced back. Maybe the starting point of 150 years ago is the issue. (

curtis2• 11 years ago

I have wondered if epigenetic effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_...) from the 1944 Dutch famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Dutch_famine_of_1944) could have resulted in a substantial positive impact on Dutch height for several generations following the famine.

It seems likely that eastern Europeans suffered much more extreme privations than the Dutch did in this time period, but maybe they also saw a similar effect, it's just less noticeable because those populations were a couple of inches shorter on average anyway. The notable thing about the Dutch is not that recent generations are taller than their forebears -- that's probably true for most all European populations. The really notable thing is that they're also taller than other northwestern populations like the Danes.

The natural selection argument is probably a better and certainly a simpler explanation, though.

Someone4• 11 years ago

What makes this such a popular area of research is not that they are taller, but that they overtook everybody else in no time:

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of European descent in North America were far taller than those in Europe and were the tallest in the world. [...] In the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a land renowned for its short population" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_huma...)

150-ish years, 6-7 generations.

curtis2• 11 years ago

So one question is, if you normalize nutrition, what's the intrinsic height difference between populations? You are correct that the speed at which the Dutch have overtaken other nearby populations is kind of surprising. A nutrition differential could make that much difference, but it seems like general nutrition shouldn't differ much at all between the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, etc. Another possibility is just the the Dutch are genetically a little bit taller on average if you normalize nutrition. But it doesn't seem like Dutch genetics should differ that much from the surrounding populations either. Could natural selection have made that much difference in Dutch genetics in just a few generations, and recent (post Industrial Revolution) generations at that?

gumby• 11 years ago

Actually this is a good guess: kids who had the bad luck of being in the wrong trimester during the height (depth?) of the famine had a might higher prevalence of schizophrenia.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9708024

ocschwar• 11 years ago

See these bollards?

http://www.road-care.co.uk/images/bollard1.jpg

They're all over Amsterdam. Strong selection pressure establishing a minimum height for men wanting to father children there.

hey1969• 11 years ago

I happen to be 2 m (6'6) tall and French-Irish. When I used to go out with a Scandinavian social club in California, we were always far taller than everyone else. More than 0.25 m difference in height makes for difficult conversation, so there's a tendency to only talk to other sized people. I also know a British guy that is 2.3 m tall and a Stanford chick whos 2.5 m (how does one get a date if you're ungainly tall?). Perhaps in a millennia, humans will be 4 m tall on average?

bshimmin• 11 years ago

Let me get this straight - the "Stanford chick" you know is the tallest woman in history? (qv. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people#Women)

sanoli• 11 years ago

He probably meant 2.05m (2 meters and 5 centimeters).

rambambam• 11 years ago

I'm a Dutch young man of 6 feet and 3 inches tall. First of all, I don't believe the claim in the beginning of the article stating that the average height of Dutch men is above 6 feet. I remember reading an article a couple of years back saying the average height for Dutch men is about 5 feet and 11 inches. To me, that looks more like it, but my opinion and experience are not based on proper research, so who knows.

The comment with a reference to the famine in 1944 got my attention though. Can it be that the famine, as an extreme condition, quickly followed by a lot of prosperity (in contrast to Eastern European), caused this remarkable quality?

I once read a book saying that children whose mother didn't eat enough during pregnancy had the tendency to eat way more than children whose mother ate enough. Starting with scarcity of nutrition leads to buffering way too much later on.

- Added FYI: My parents were born in 1949 and 1950. Their parents experienced the famine. Last but not least, I tend to be attracted to the taller women overhere.

mcv2• 11 years ago

I think the 6 feet is the average height of young Dutch men. Older generations are shorter, but the last generation to reach adulthood is really well over 180 cm in height.

Almaviva• 11 years ago

As a shorter than average man often disillusioned reading hundreds of honest female online personals, what about sexual selection and cultural expectations of women in choosing a mate?

throwaway9789• 11 years ago

As a fellow short guy this definitely an issue I face too. In a way you have to appreciate the honesty of these women who make completely categorical statements that they will not consider anyone below their own height, or even anyone below the average male height (so roughly 50% of males) or sometimes even setting their minimum heights well above the male average. Height is simply a major factor of male attractiveness, the problem is that unlike other factors it's not communicated well beforehand and comes as a shock to some men when they realise just how important it is in the dating market.

The other issue is that sometimes the exlusion statement is phrased in a nasty or blunt way that wouldn't be socially acceptable at all if it were a man talking about a factor of female attractiveness. I am sure there are males out there who make nasty and blunt comments in their profiles, but I am also sure there are fewer of them and they get ruled out for saying such things even by women to whom the statement doesn't apply.

Finally it's even worse that on many sites the statement ruling men under X height out comes at the end of the profile! So you might see how much you have in common with someone and start thinking about a cool date to go on and then get to the end of the profile to find out you never had a chance to begin with.

I would suspect this factor plays a part, but is almost certainly behind better nutrition, in the general increases in heights across the board through the baby boom and sexual revolution in Western countries. But you'd need to explain why it was particularly strong in the Netherlands for it to explain their above average height increases.

jules2• 11 years ago

For what it's worth I think the importance put on height is primarily a US phenomenon. That's not to say that it's unimportant elsewhere, but not as exceptionally important as in the US. It's one of the factors among many.

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

It could simply be an outlier.

Given a group of populations of various size, small populations tend to fill the outlier positions. You see this with schools - almost all of the top ranking schools are tiny. As are the bottom. They all pretty much return to the mean over time.

jules2• 11 years ago

Yea...no. The population of the Netherlands is 17 million. There is absolutely no way this is a statistical outlier.

the_cat_kittles• 11 years ago

its pretty simple to see how likely the population's mean height is explained by randomness alone (your hypothesis)... my guess is that the sample size is so large that the probability is vanishingly small

plorg• 11 years ago

I was born in a community of mostly second- and third-generation-removed descendents of Dutch immigrants in the United States. As with most of my friends and classmates, my parents can trace all or almost all of their ancestors back to the Netherlands immediately before coming to the U.S.

Anecdotally, most of the men in my generation are nearly 6' or taller. I have heard the same said of men from several similar small, Dutch-immigrant communities, and those in surrounding towns and counties often remark about how tall the Dutch descendants in the community are (for example, in the context of high school sports). The women are taller, as well, than those in surrounding, mostly German-immigrant, communities.

I have paid a small amount of attention to studies like these. Because of the demographics of my community I've been somewhat skeptical of some of the suggested explanations. Particularly the diet reasoning struck me as odd since despite how closely the community identifies with the Netherlands, it is very much culturally American, with the attendant American diet.

I suspect that genetics really are a big part of the reason that Dutch people grow as tall as they do. The selection reasoning, though, makes some sense as well, though I don't know enough about bloodlines in my community (or the statistical height comparison to current Dutch people) to make much comment about it.

mcv2• 11 years ago

I've always wondered if the amount of milk and cheese we consume might be a factor. But I expect there's more countries where those things are popular in large amounts.

Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

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