/wiz/ - Wizardry

What are the chances the change in average height are due to hormonal or environmental factors, in part, and that it's not all down to better nutrition?

Just for an anecdote, me and my brother grew up malnorished by western standards. I had low blood pressure as a child due to just eating the cheapest cereal grains for years. I remember being tested at 10 for low iron levels, and when I stood up too fast I often got dissy. Regularly 'd be hungry at school as my lunches were small. Both me and my brother grew up to be some of the tallest people in town, but we have tall, thin frames. We're both significantly taller than our parents too.

In the 1950s you never really heard of kids going to bed hungry that often in the west, they typically had a solid diet with three square meals and full pantries. That's not really much different to a kid in 1980 or the year 2000. I doubt there's been that much significant nutritional gains to cause increased height since then. Maybe it's an epigenetic change due to the abundance of food? Perhaps, but we know what we eat and how we live is also changing it. Even lower testosterone levels causing delays in when the plates fuse as a teenager could be behind it. People noticed Eunuchs used to be really tall and lean, so are modern people suffering from the same effect?

People say it's sexual selection driving it, with high status tall men being more desired. That might be true before the industrial revolution, but I don't think it's true anymore. The crabs had a source showing it's shorter men breeding more actually (because lower class people are short and fertility is dysgenic). Tall men might be more desired, but they typically don't have more children. So in recent years sexual selection doesn't drive it. Just anecdotally again, being around food banks, you see the people are very short by modern standards and have many children.

We can also look at jawlines and teeth malocclusion to see an environmental impact people put down entirely to genetics for years. You can see in the skeletal record that everyone used to have straight teeth and wide jaws, and that changed around the industrial revolution. People are only now coming around to realize that it's due to changes in the way we eat and live, especially with eating soft foods and breastfeeding less.