I f you want to predict how tall your children might one day be, a good bet would be to look in the mirror, and at your mate. Studies going back almost a century have estimated that height is 80-90% heritable. So if 29 centimetres separate the tallest 5% of a population from the shortest, then genetics would account for as many as 27 of them 1. This year, three groups of researchers 2-4 scoured the genomes of huge populations (the largest study 4 looked at more than 30,000 people) for genetic variants associated with the height differences. More than 40 turned up. But there was a problem: the variants had tiny effects. Altogether, they accounted for little more than 5% of height's heritabilityjust 6 centimetres by the calculations above.

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