Height and reproductive success

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. ABSTRACTIn Western societies, height is positively correlated with reproductive success (RS) for men but negatively correlated with RS for women. These relationships have been attributed to sexual selection: women prefer tall men, and men prefer short women. It is this success in the marriage market which leads to higher RS for tall men and short women. We have already shown that the relationship between height and RS for women is quite different in a non-Western context. In a subsistence farming community in rural Gambia, height is positively correlated with reproductive success for women, largely due to the higher survival of the children of tall women. Here, the relationship between height and reproductive success is analysed for men in the same community. For these Gambian men, there is no significant relationship between height and the number of children they produce, although tall men do contract more marriages than shorter men. We conclude that environmental context needs to be taken into account when analysing human reproductive behaviour. Height and reproductive successRebecca Sear

How universal are human mate choices? Size does not matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate

“…This is no different from the proportion of female-taller marriages expected by chance (8.8%: Figure 1 shows the proportion of female-taller marriages in this Hadza population. R. S. has previously investigated this phenomenon in both a post-industrial society (UK) and a pre-industrial agricultural community in the Gambia, and the results of these analyses are also presented in figure 1 for comparison (Sear 2006). The proportion of female-taller marriages in the UK is significantly lower than expected by chance, but the two traditional populations show a frequency of female-taller relationships no different from that expected from mating which is random with respect to height.…”

The life-history trade-off between fertility and child survival

“…One possibility is competition between surviving offspring for later reproductive opportunities. For example, several studies have shown that fertility is negatively associated with offspring height [46,55], which may ultimately reduce adult reproductive success in both sexes [56]. Yet, current literature suggests that siblings only depress marital and reproductive success in situations where material wealth is transferred across generations, i.e.…”

Parental investment and the optimization of human family size

“…All of these factors could allow some parents to invest more in both reproductive rate and parental investment, while nevertheless remaining subject to allocation trade-offs. Female physical condition is also clearly important; it is now well established that in many populations children of tall mothers experience significantly lower mortality [55,56].…”