{"id":40673,"date":"2011-05-14T19:26:56","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T03:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=11715"},"modified":"2011-05-14T19:26:56","modified_gmt":"2011-05-15T03:26:56","slug":"natural-selection-for-height-in-europeans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/05\/14\/natural-selection-for-height-in-europeans\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural selection for height in Europeans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I&#8217;ve always been on the short side at 5 feet 8 inches, but when I was in Italy for 3 weeks one year back (between Milan and Rome, with disproportionate time spent in the Piedmont) I didn&#8217;t feel as small (I recall feeling similarly when I was in Cajun country in the early 2000s). <a href=\"http:\/\/infoproc.blogspot.com\/2011\/05\/height-breeding-values-and-selection.html\">Steve Hsu<\/a> alerts me to the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.genetic-inference.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/bg2011-geography-and-recent-human-evolution\/\">Luke Jostins<\/a> is back blogging at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.genetic-inference.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/bg2011-geography-and-recent-human-evolution\/\">Genetic Inference<\/a>, reporting from the <a href=\"http:\/\/meetings.cshl.edu\/meetings\/genome11.shtml\">Biology of Genomes<\/a> meeting. Apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.childrenshospital.org\/cfapps\/research\/data_admin\/Site2548\/mainpageS2548P1sublevel24.html\">Michael Turchin<\/a> has found that:<\/p>\n<p>1) Alleles known to be associated with greater height are found at higher frequencies in Northern Europeans<\/p>\n<p>2) Alleles known to be associated with greater height also exhibit signatures of natural selection<\/p>\n<p>\nHe used the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.helmholtz-muenchen.de\/epi\/beitraege-zu-netzwerken\/giant-genomewide-investigation-of-anthropometric-measures\/index.html\">GIANT consortium<\/a> data set. How big is it? <b>129 thousand individuals!<\/b> Luke adds:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This is a textbook example of how an evolutionary study should be done; you show a phenotypic difference exists, that it is heritable, and that it is under selection. <b>This opens the &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I&#8217;ve always been on the short&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4,1322,82,1336,508],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-genetics","category-genetics-of-height","category-genomics","category-genomics-of-height","category-height"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40673"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40808,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40673\/revisions\/40808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}