TALL men are more likely to have children than their vertically challenged friends because women find height attractive, a new study shows. The preference may be putting evolutionary pressure on men, even today.
In an earlier study, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool trawled through lonely hearts adverts to find which attributes men and women like in their partners (New Scientist, 11 February 1995, p 26). He noticed that men only put their height in their ads if they are tall. 鈥淢en never say `I鈥檓 a 5-foot-2 Danny DeVito look-alike鈥�,鈥� says Dunbar. 鈥淵ou only advertise things that are advantageous.鈥�
If tall men are truly more attractive to women, Dunbar reasoned, they might have more children than short men. To test this, he teamed up with two colleagues in the Polish city of Wroclaw. Together they examined the medical records of more than 4400 healthy men aged 25 to 60 who were given compulsory medical examinations in Wroclaw between 1983 and 1989.
Advertisement
The team noted the men鈥檚 heights and whether they had children. They then adjusted the figures to account for factors such as the trend for people to be taller the more recently they were born, due to improving diet and healthcare.
The results showed childless men were on average significantly shorter than men with one or more children. This confirms that women prefer taller men, says Dunbar. And the finding was backed by another feature of the Wroclaw men: bachelors were shorter than their married counterparts.
There may be several reasons why women prefer tall men. Society generally associates lofty men with wealth, success and good health. But the fact that the effect is so prominent suggests to Dunbar that the preference is also programmed into women鈥檚 genes. This might date back to a time when tall men in hunting societies were stronger and genetically better equipped for the struggle to survive.
Dunbar hopes his study will persuade scientists that sexual selection influences behaviour. 鈥淚n the social sciences, people seem very reluctant to believe that evolutionary principles guide human behaviour at all. It must help to turn the tide.鈥�
鈥淚t鈥檚 an interesting study that suggests many more questions,鈥� says Robert Barton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Durham. For example, does the same effect occur in different cultures? Other research suggests extreme height is unattractive to women, which may explain why evolution has not stretched the height gap between the sexes further. 鈥淐learly, something has limited that process,鈥� Barton says.
Dunbar鈥檚 study also shows that selection for tall men stops when women can鈥檛 be choosy. Men born in the 1930s entered the marriage market just after the Second World War, when there were fewer males in Wroclaw than usual. Tall or short, all these men had the same likelihood of having children. 鈥淲omen had to make do with what they got,鈥� says Dunbar.