The Pith: When it comes to the final outcome of a largely biologically specified trait like human height it looks as if it isn't just the genes your parents give you that matters. Rather, the relationship of their genes also counts. The more dissimilar they are genetically, the taller you are likely to be (all things equal).
Dienekes points me to an interesting new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Isolation by distance between spouses and its effect on children's growth in height. The results are rather straightforward: the greater the distance between the origin of one's parents, the taller one is likely to be, especially in the case of males. These findings were robust even after controlling for confounds such as socioeconomic status. Their explanation? Heterosis, whether through heterozygote advantage or the masking of recessive deleterious alleles. The paper is short and sweet, but first one has to keep in mind the long history of this sort of research in the murky domain of human quantitative genetics. This is not a straight-forward molecular genetic paper where there's a laser-like focus on one locus, and the mechanistic issues are clear and distinct. We are talking about a quantitative continuous trait, height, and how it varies within the population. We are also using geographical distance as a proxy for genetic distance. Finally, when it comes to the parameters affecting these quantitative traits there are a host of confounds, some of which are addressed in this paper. In other words, there's no simple solution to the fact that nature can be quite the tangle, more so in some cases than others. Because of the necessity for subtlety in this sort of statistical genetic work one must always be careful about taking results at face value. From what I can gather the history of topics such as heterosis in human genetics is always fraught with normative import. The founder of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Charles Davenport, studied the outcomes of individuals who were a product of varied matings in relation to genetic distance in the early 1920s. This was summed up in his book Race Crossing in Jamaica:
A quantitative study of 3 groups of agricultural Jamaican adults: Blacks, Whites, and hybrids between them; also of several hundred children at all developmental stages. The studies are morphological, physiological, psychological, developmental and eugenical. The variability of each race and sex in respect to each bodily dimension and many basis vary just as morphological traits do. In some sensory tests the Blacks are superior to Whites; in some intellectual tests the reverse is found. A portion of the hybrids are mentally inferior to the Blacks. The negro child has, apparently, from birth on, different physical proportions than the white child.
