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STANDING TALL MATTERS...
Scoring another BIG point for the height advantage!
New research suggests taller men are more likely to marry and tend to have more children than short guys. What's behind the phenomenon — and whether women prefer taller men or those men are simply more outgoing is up for debate. However, the numbers clearly stack up against short guys!
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Scientists studied the medical records of about 3,200 men ages 25 to 60 and found that childless men were on average 1.2 inches shorter than men who had at least one child.
Bachelors were about an inch shorter on average than married men. That was true even after researchers took into account the fact that men's heights have been increasing over the decades largely because of better nutrition. The records, which were collected over six years starting in 1983 showed that tall men in their 20s, 30s and 40s all had more children than their shorter peers.
Height didn’t seem to matter for men in their 50s. Robin I.M. Dunbar of the University of Liverpool said that is because those men came of age after the Second World War — a catastrophe that claimed the lives of so many men and reduced women's mating options. However, Dunbar said the numbers clearly show that women favour taller men — something that other research suggests is true across all cultures."Basically, height is a proxy for other variables that women find desirable: men who can protect them, provide them with resources, have good social status and aren't easily dominated by other men," said Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology and the study's co-author. The findings were published in the journal "Nature".
Out of the military service records of 4,400 men, the researchers excluded men who were abnormally short or tall. The average height of the 3,200 men whose records were part of their final sample was five-foot-six.
The researchers meant to study men whose height was not so gargantuan, or so small, as to have skewed the results. (Their methodology would have excluded someone like Wilt Chamberlain, the seven-foot-one basketball superstar who once bragged of having had sex with over 20,000 women.)
While other studies have shown that taller than average men have higher incomes and greater social status than shorter men, this study is the first to demonstrate a direct link between height and reproductive success, said Dr David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Buss, who has written two books on human mating habits, said the female preference for taller males harkens back to the earliest stages of human evolution where prehistoric women chose mates who could offer them the best protection and provide for their needs...
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"This study shows that even in modern times the kind of selection we might think of as prehistoric continues to operate," Dr Dunbar said. He undertook the research after noticing that in personal ads men advertised their height only if they were tall or taller than average."You didn't see any advertisements saying, 'I’m five-foot-three, give me a call...'"
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