Why height matters
In modern western societies, studies have found that women who are on the short side tend to have more children. In contrast, average-height men do the best, reproductively speaking, outpacing short and tall men in number of children fathered, Stulp said.
Men and women are sexually dimorphic, meaning there are obvious bodily differences in size and shape between the sexes. But we also share most of our genome, meaning that evolution has a limited toolbox for creating this dimorphism. That can lead to conflict in which evolutionary forces act on males and females in opposite directions. Given the evolutionary pressure for short women and average men, height seemed a potential area of conflict.
Stulp and his colleagues pulled data from a long-running research project called the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has followed more than 10,000 Wisconsin high-school graduates for nearly 50 years.
