Evolutionary Battle of the Sexes Drives Human Height Height is
an advantage for men in reproduction, but not for women. CREDIT:
Franck Boston, Shutterstock For women looking to pass on their
genes, it pays to be short. For men, tall is the ideal. The
result? An evolutionary tug-of-war in which neither gender
reaches their perfect height. Those are the results of a new
study published today (Aug. 7) in the journal Biology Letters.
The research finds that an evolutionary battle of the sexes
keeps the genders in an endless feedback loop of height
variations across the generations. "We should not simply assume
that when a trait is beneficial for one sex, that selection or
evolution will necessarily favor this trait," study researcher
Gert Stulp, a scientist at the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands, told LiveScience in an email. In the same way,
traits that harm one sex but not the other may not be "weeded
out" by natural selection, Stulp said. "This may even hold for
health-related traits, such that gene