Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

mobile.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#21

Post by rambambam »

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.

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#22

Post by Someone »

curtis wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#23

Post by jessaustin »

staunch wrote: post #16
phpnode wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 discipl…

...for having from boyhood been accustomed to no employment, or discipline, they do nothing at all contrary to their inclination...

Now we see why the state had to subjugate them! b^)

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#25

Post by Someone »

pimlottc wrote: post #19
thisjepisje wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a monkey sandwich story to me.

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

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=nl&tl=en&u=htt... (Google hasn't figured out yet when to translate an idiomatic term literally yet. That makes for a funny translation. See for example the subscript of the first photo)

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#26

Post by curtis »

Someone wrote: post #22
curtis wrote: post #14

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…

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/wik…

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?

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#27

Post by bshimmin »

hey1969 wrote: post #20

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?)…

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)

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#28

Post by radicalbyte »

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.

Re: Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage

#30

Post by jules »

radicalbyte wrote: post #28

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.

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