An Intersection of Biology and Politics

So the height of the human animal waxes and wanes with the quality of its food supply. The case in point: Recent decades have brought improvements to the formerly fetid territory of Europe, from whence my ancestors fled. Dutch males are now the tallest humans on the planet, averaging five feet ten inches. Why Holland? With socialized medicine and financial support for the poor, the Dutch culture ensures that the offspring of all parents get sufficient calories and sufficient protection from disease. Thus each individual comes closer to reaching his potential. (They may still have a ways to grow. Some scholars expect the Dutch to rise another four inches before they hit their genetic ceiling.) By contrast, in my culture food and medicine are shared less equally, with many of our young failing to find healthful food and medical care. Thus poor humans on average are an inch shorter than rich ones in my culture, depressing the national average. And obviously, in realms like Guatemala and Bangladesh, where the distribution of food and safe shelter is more uneven, human height is severely stunted. Sometimes, a discrete event is enough to push human height up or down. Europeans shrank during the Little Ice Age of the 1600s when crops failed. Japanese humans lost height in the hungry years after World War II. We would need a few generations of ideal nutrition for all the world's humans before we could see what the underlying genetic height of various populations might be. For now we can say that the height of the human animal varies by race, from four feet eight inches in male Efe Pygmies of Zaire to five feet ten inches in the Dutch.

From The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself by Hannah Holmes. (Emphasis mine.)