[King_Chief_Fan]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I was thinking about this the other day. I think I've mentioned it before, but I'm alone and bored.

We have a social construct where women don't typically date guys who are shorter than them, and men don't typically date women who are taller than them. While a tall man may date women of any size, he's more likely to end up with taller women because there's less competition. A short man is typically going to be fishing almost exclusively off the petite end of the spectrum.

I'm not saying that it'll happen overnight, and there are a lot of confounding factors, but in the ultra-long term, you have a disproportionate number of pairings of tall genes and a disproportionate number of pairings of short genes. So that would logically mean that we're going to flatten the bell curve of heights over time with more tall people and more short people than we would get with random pairings. Right?

Then I wonder about maximum and minimum heights. Do humans have natural limits? With this socially selective breeding, can we keep hitting new maximum and minimum heights? In the dog world, mastiffs and Newfoundlands are probably six times bigger than generic domesticated dogs, and chihuahuas are 20 percent of the size of generic domesticated dogs. Can humans push the same limits and hit mature weights of 40 to 900 pounds? Can we go further? In a thousand millennia, if you're 14 inches tall, you're probably still looking for that 12 or 13 inch wife. And the process would accelerate because she's unlikely to date and marry the 9-foot, 900 pound subspecies of human. What's the upper and lower limit over the course of 100,000 years?

And did cro-magnons and ancient Egyptians have the same social preference? How much of a head start do we have? I'm thinking it's a new phenomenon because a lot of marriages in past times were arranged.

the main point I got from the post is that you are bored and you took the time to share that with us