Note: The following was written by someone else. I simply saved it, but lost the original source.
About the myth that humans select for height in a mate: Our male evolutionary ancestors from 500,000 years ago were on average 5'9.
It seems to be a popular
trope on the Internet that women (and even some men) are somehow
biologically 'programmed' or 'hardwired' to be attracted towards taller
men, or that people are programmed/hardwired to treat tall men better.
This is not true and a falsehood most often used to justify
shallowness and/or discrimination in the working place and other venues.
Our direct ancestors in the line of human evolution, Homo
heidelbergensis, were of the same average height of anatomically modern
humans today: five foot nine.
If there was some kind of hardwired selection pressure that had since
evolved into modern humans, which appeared around 100 to 150 thousand
years ago, you would expect for that pressure to have exerted its
influence and for the human race to be significantly taller, or at the
very least marginally so, but that is not the case at all.
"But wait!
I've seen suits of armor from the middle ages, and they were really
small. And I saw that in time of anquitity, humans were much smaller
than they are today! So clearly you are wrong about this".
Well, that's not the full story. Yes, there was a fluctuation the
last 10,000 years or so up until about a century ago -- but it was not
due to anything evolutionary. It was the result of several things,
notably the adoption of agrigculture and even more recently the
industrial revolution, both which harmed development. But in fact, before the adoption of agriculture, our hunter gatherer human ancestors were still on average around five foot nine as recently as the last ice age. This is still seen in impoverished nations today
with populations that do not approach the average height of well
nourished nations.
Evolution via natural
selection happens because in theory some traits provide more favorable
advantages for survival and/or reproduction, either as functionally
useful or desired through sexual selection, and thus increase in
frequency in the gene pool over many generations.
This hasn't happened with height. Humans have the same average
height they had 15,000 years ago, and 500,000 years ago. This implies
that there is neither a functional advantage of height nor a hardwired,
biological sexual selection for it, like so many claim. Otherwise there
would have been an increase in human stature over the last 500,000
years.
Don't let anyone try and convince you otherwise - any modern day
trends in attraction are the result of a ubiquitous media presence that
pushes this attitude, that didn't exist until the last century or so.
