Fisherman runaway selection for height

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Fisherman runaway selection for height

OmegaKV
I find it curious that every woman seems to have some ridiculous height requirement for dating, and yet over the last few decades the average height for the USA and Western Europe has not increased (although it has increased for Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with the average height of young Lebanese men now surpassing that of non-hispanic white Americans). You may say height has not increased due to immigration from non-white countries, which tend to be shorter, but some surveys control for race and the US height for non-hispanic whites is not much different from the average height for all races in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country

The 25th percentile of height in the USA is 5'7. If you were to ask women about their height requirement, I think very few would say 5'7 is acceptable. So since women have so much sexual choice you would expect men below 5'7 to be bred out of the gene pool within a generation, dramatically increasing the average height. You would expect it to lead to fisherian runaway selection, because once the 5'7 guys are bred out, women are going to increase their height requirements, resulting in the average man perpetually becoming taller and taller. But height hasn't really increased in the US over the last couple of decades.

I wonder why. Perhaps American women are selecting so strongly for other things that they are willing to compromise on height if it allows them to select more strongly for these other things.

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Re: Fisherman runaway selection for height

fschmidt
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The height obsession is new, not more than 20 years old, so no time for selection to work here.