Height
razib | January 16, 2010I was doing some exploring of the effect of a transition to agriculture on human height. Until the past few centuries humans were much shorter than they had been during the Ice Age. In the process I came upon some interesting data. Height, health, and development:
Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where…
razib | January 13, 2010The changing height of Homo erectus:
Today, I think it's fair to say that the variation of stature in Homo erectus was more or less like the variation within living people. There are short and tall populations today, varied in ecology and latitude. The average stature of young men in the Netherlands today is 184 cm. Adult women in the Philippines average only 150 cm. So the best way to compare statures is to illustrate the range.
That being said, I don't think we know how stature has evolved over time. We do have some data points -- the Neandertals were shorter than Upper Paleolithic…
razib | September 1, 2009I have recently mentioned an analogy between the heritability of height & weight. That is, the proportion of variance of the trait which can be explained by variance in the genes. How closely do parents resemble offspring. A new paper in PLoS ONE, How Humans Differ from Other Animals in Their Levels of Morphological Variation, look at how this variation among human populations compares to other animals:
Animal species come in many shapes and sizes, as do the individuals and populations that make up each species. To us, humans might seem to show particularly high levels of morphological…
razib | July 6, 2009
Peter Suderman & Megan McArdle are getting married. One of my thoughts was, "How tall will their offspring be?" (assuming they are intent on producing any) I couldn't tell Peter Suderman's height from photographs with certainty, but he has confirmed they are the same height, 6 feet 2 inches. What sort of heights would we expect for the McSuderkinder?* Assuming 80% heritability for height, 3 inches as the standard deviation for both sexes, 5'10 and 5'4 as mean heights (male & female), and plugging into the calculator:
The highest probability of height for any male offspring: 6 feet 3…
cwilcox | May 27, 2009When I interned at Florida Aquarium I had the pleasure of working with two screech owls. Sure, there were bigger, more impressive looking raptors that I could hold and show people, but those pint-sized versions were my favorite. It wasn't just that they were small (though that totally helped). It was that when you'd go to take them out of their cage to walk around with, they would puff up and try to act all big an menacing - which, frankly, just made them look like giant brown cotton balls.
What the birds were aiming to do was make themselves look bigger and more important. All kinds of…
razib | April 3, 2009A new paper on the genetics of height, Meta-Analysis of Genome-Wide Scans for Human Adult Stature Identifies Novel Loci and Associations with Measures of Skeletal Frame Size:
Recent genome-wide (GW) scans have identified several independent loci affecting human stature, but their contribution through the different skeletal components of height is still poorly understood. We carried out a genome-wide scan in 12,611 participants, followed by replication in an additional 7,187 individuals, and identified 17 genomic regions with GW-significant association with height. Of these, two are entirely…
razib | March 6, 2009Genetic Determinants of Height Growth Assessed Longitudinally from Infancy to Adulthood in the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. Here's the important part from the discussion:
To summarise, our results show that nearly half of the genetic variants associated with adult height in this sample had a measurable effect on PHV [peak height velocity] in infancy or puberty. Only one variant was associated with PHV in both infancy and puberty. We found suggestive evidence that the associations of some of the variants may be age-dependent. The majority of signals associated with growth parameters in…