Comment by underlipton
20 hours ago
The Dutch have been both the shortest and tallest population in Western Europe in the past 300 years. I've never found a satisfactory explanation for how this can be, if heritability figures for human height (and weight, and IQ, and-) are correct.
My intuition is that the average genetic human potential, for traits that are ostensibly hierarchical, is higher and narrower than is usually accepted - which is uncomfortable for those whose ambitions require, either directly or by incidence, that most people don't reach that potential. Or, that they're not actually hierarchical traits at all; value depends on context (and is generally made up).
Oddly, the former is probably preferable to most, since, "There is no inherent value in dying old versus young," probably doesn't track for most people.
The belabored point of the article is that heritability isn't fixed. In the past there were highly variable rates of malnutrition which created a major environmental factor for height, as well as many other traits, which would reduce their heritability. But as malnutrition faded and most environmental factors that significantly affect height faded, differences in populations became increasingly determined by genetics, and so its heritability increased.
> I've never found a satisfactory explanation
You don't find better nutrition and sexual selection for height satisfactory?
> value depends on context (and is generally made up).
Value is not relative. It is objective, ontological, and teleological. Context only shifts situational value relevance, but the value itself remains as is.
>You don't find better nutrition and sexual selection for height satisfactory?
A few centuries aren't long enough for such marked selective pressure on a polygenic trait.
>Value is not relative. It is objective, ontological, and teleological.
I am conflating objective measurements (value) with subjective situational qualifications of the relevance of those measurements (also "value", kinda) because most people understand that I mean the latter. I acknowledge your pedantic correction of this conflation; please feel good about yourself and move on with your day.
"A few centuries aren't long enough for such marked selective pressure on a polygenic trait."
Are you sure? In extremis, if blue-eyed people (a polygenic trait) are considered absolutely unfuckable, I would expect them to disappear from the population in 10-15 generations, or at least become very, very rare.