It's official - tall guys get the girls, according to research published this morning in the journal, Nature. Short men like Napoleon might do well on the battlefield, but when it comes to progeny, height has the edge.
Researchers from the University of Wroclaw, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Liverpool collaborated on a study of 4,500 Polish men aged between 25 and 60. Put simply, they were trying to establish whether women were more likely to fancy tall men.
Not to take the mystery and romance out of sex and courtship, the authors pointed out that sexual selection is a well established evolutionary process "based on preferences for specific traits in one sex by members of the other sex".
Female birds are attracted by elaborate male plumage and in selecting colourful mates they perpetuate and strengthen the occurrence of this trait in offspring. There is no reason why this shouldn't work in humans, the authors suggest.
If their assumptions and research are correct, women do have a "thing" for height. The researchers found taller men were reproductively more successful than shorter men, "indicating that there is active selection for stature in male partners by women", they conclude.
The team controlled for variables such as education, rural or urban because city folk tend to be taller, marital status because bachelors tend to be shorter but can also have children without being married, and finally for age and employment status.
They also ruled out exceptionally short or tall individuals who were so far from the "average" this might have influenced whether they were lucky at love.
Their results showed that for each age category, men with children were on average significantly taller than childless men. Across the board, the difference amounted to about three centimetres between men with at least one child and childless men.
The only break from this rule occurred for men born in the 1930s when height didn't seem to matter as much. The researchers speculate the height thing went out the window just after the second World War when men were in short supply. "These results indicate that the effect of height on reproductive output might be due to shorter men being disadvantaged in the search for a mate," the researchers conclude.
Of course their scientific study left out other important considerations. The height of a short man sitting snugly in his Ferrari might be no more than four ft, but the vehicular effect on natural selection can also affect how lucky he gets.
