Abstract
Body height is a life-history component. It involves important costs for its expression and maintenance, which may originate trade-offs on other costly components such as reproduction or immunity. Although previous evidence has supported the idea that human height could be a sexually selected trait, the explanatory mechanisms that underlie this selection are poorly understood. Despite extensive studies on the association between height and attractiveness, the role of immunity in linking this relation is scarcely studied, particularly in non-Western populations. Here, we tested whether human height is related to health measured by self-perception, and relevant nutritional and health anthropometric indicators in three Latin-American populations that widely differ in socioeconomic and ecological conditions: two urbanised populations from Bogota (Colombia) and Mexico City (Mexico), and one isolated indigenous population (Me’Phaa, Mexico). Results showed that self-reported health is best predicted by an interaction between height and waist circumference: the presumed benefits of being taller are waist-dependent, and affect taller people more than shorter individuals. If health and genetic quality cues play an important role in human mate-choice, and height and waist interact to signal health, its evolutionary consequences, including cognitive and behavioural effects, should be addressed in future research.
Highlights
This idea is supported by evidence that the male height is directly correlated with reproductive success, which is not applicable to women, suggesting an unrestricted directional selection that favours very tall men but not to very tall women[12]
Previous evidence has supported the idea that human height could be a sexually selected trait, little is known regarding whether this role is based on the honest signalling of individual quality[6]
All data and code used to perform these analyses are openly available from the Open Science Framework (OSF) project for this study
Summary
This idea is supported by evidence that the male height is directly correlated with reproductive success, which is not applicable to women, suggesting an unrestricted directional selection that favours very tall men but not to very tall women[12]. Previous evidence has supported the idea that human height could be a sexually selected trait, little is known regarding whether this role is based on the honest signalling of individual quality[6] To test this idea, it is important to consider that height needs to face a trade-off with other life-history components[17], such as reproduction[18] or immunity[19], and its expression should involve certain costs that not all individuals could afford, such that there would be an important phenotypic variation on this trait. Reproduction and immunity could face a trade-off with height because the effect of sex hormones on these life-history components; the trade-off with reproduction occurs when the notorious increment of sex steroids, testosterone and oestrogens, induce an accelerated growth period in puberty for both sexes[23], and a reallocation of physiological resources for reproduction posterior to this period (i.e. spermatogenesis, follicular maturation, etc.), which results in a growth cessation. Height can be used for potential partners to receive information about the quality of potential mates; only high-quality individuals could afford to allocate resources to this attractive secondary sexual trait[33], which would result in an increased sexual preference towards taller individuals
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