Jessica Tyrrell, research fellow1 2, Samuel E Jones, associate research fellow1, Robin Beaumont, associate research fellow1, Christina M Astley, research fellow3 4, Rebecca Lovell, research fellow2, Hanieh Yaghootkar, research fellow1, Marcus Tuke, associate research fellow1, Katherine S Ruth, associate research fellow1, Rachel M Freathy, senior research fellow1, Joel N Hirschhorn, professor2 3 5, Andrew R Wood, research fellow1, Anna Murray, senior lecturer1, Michael N Weedon, associate professor1, Timothy M Frayling, professor1
Abstract
Objective To determine whether height and body mass index (BMI) have a causal role in five measures of socioeconomic status.
Design Mendelian randomisation study to test for causal effects of differences in stature and BMI on five measures of socioeconomic status. Mendelian randomisation exploits the fact that genotypes are randomly assigned at conception and thus not confounded by non-genetic factors.
Setting UK Biobank.
Participants 119 669 men and women of British ancestry, aged between 37 and 73 years.
Main outcome measures Age completed full time education, degree level education, job class, annual household income, and Townsend deprivation index.
Results In the UK Biobank study, shorter stature and higher BMI were observationally associated with several measures of lower socioeconomic status. The associations between shorter stature and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in men, and the associations between higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status tended to be stronger in women. For example, a 1 standard deviation (SD) higher BMI was associated with a £210 (€276; $300; 95% confidence interval £84 to £420; P=6×10−3) lower annual household income in men and a £1890 (£1680 to £2100; P=6×10−15) lower annual household income in women. Genetic analysis provided evidence that these associations were partly causal. A genetically determined 1 SD (6.3 cm) taller stature caused a 0.06 (0.02 to 0.09) year older age of completing full time education (P=0.01), a 1.12 (1.07 to 1.18) times higher odds of working in a skilled profession (P=6×10−7), and a £1130 (£680 to £1580) higher annual household income (P=4×10−8). Associations were stronger in men. A genetically determined 1 SD higher BMI (4.6 kg/m2) caused a £2940 (£1680 to £4200; P=1×10−5) lower annual household income and a 0.10 (0.04 to 0.16) SD (P=0.001) higher level of deprivation in women only.
Conclusions These data support evidence that height and BMI play an important partial role in determining several aspects of a person’s socioeconomic status, especially women’s BMI for income and deprivation and men’s height for education, income, and job class. These findings have important social and health implications, supporting evidence that overweight people, especially women, are at a disadvantage and that taller people, especially men, are at an advantage.
Klevius conclusion: Older people are generally shorter than younger generations. Older people also have less education than younger ones. And what was previously considered middle class is now lower "socioeconomic status" (the validity and value basis for this concept could also be harshly questioned). Today most youngsters go for a university degree. This was definitely not the case 50 years ago. Also, the top was much narrower back then when blue-collars were much more frequent.
And when it comes to fat women the age pattern is the same added by the fact that women of low "socioeconomic status" are often just that, fat.
Remids Klevius of a Swedish "study" that concluded that unemployment causes mental illness because there were was more mental illness among unemployed. However, were do you think people suffering from schizophrenia or mano-depressives end up - among the employed with good socioeconomic status or among unemployed with low?
Have these "researchers" even corrected for these extremely self evident facts?
What we do know though is that shorter people under equal circumstances have better health prospect. What we don't know is the exact formula for why people have become taller in the West (Japanese in Hawai constitute the classic example together with Skolt Samis in Russia/Fnland).
In most cases it's definitely not lack of nutrition that is the main factor. We have seen starving people growing to normal height without almost no flesh on their bodies.
There are some candidates though such as:
Growth hormone in Western food until it was stopped.
Shorter populations mixing with taller populations in a way that skews the mean.
Cultural "Hollywood" effect on women in choosing taller men in countries were their choice isn't restricted by backward anti Human Rights cultures.
However, we also know that there is always a regression backwards to a mean.
Albert Einstein was short compared to modern young Westerners.
update:
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Why were tall men from the south dumber than tall men from the north?
Why has the tallest region in Europe (parts of Balkan) also been the poorest when the next tallest region (Northern Europe) has been the most affluent?
Answer: It's got absolutely nothing to do with tallness - and everything to do with brainpower. Oops, did Klevius say something "blasphemic"? Ok, here's Klevius' defense.
So what if Väinö Myllyrinne had been born into a warrior family some 5,000 ybp and equipped with a brain like, say Klevius (but way more aggressive)? Oops, Klevius did it again.
Height is genetically determined. Stunting because of malnutrition is only between 1-2 cm in a study of the Chinese famine 1959-1961. What has previously been assigned to malnutrition is in fact selection. Growth hormone irregularities are relatively rare.
There's a distinct genetic growth stop at around age 14 for a huge (?) part of the world's population, while others continue growing until the age of 16-18. Mixing of these genes give results that no one so far has studied in more detail. This is the basic reason for height variation among today's humans. Klevius strongly suggests that someone starts a research project based on this Klevius' problem formulation.
However, some continue growing also after their growth spurt. One such an example was the world's tallest healthy man (most exceptionally tall people are sick and die young) the Finnish Väinö Myllyrinta.
Peter Klevius' (who isn't tall) analysis: Because the northerners had access to short and intelligent women to the north of themselves among the hunter-gatherer population, they also got closer to the genetic background of modern humans. So some kids became short, others average, and some tall - and some even blond. Likewise, some got average IQ while a few got the genius gene. And a few became highly intelligent giant warriors at a time when size mattered - especially in sparsely populated areas where hit and run attacks were easy and where they could gather more of the same while going southward. One may assume that these phenomena happened more frequently during bad farming times - which occurred quite often in the vulnerable climatic borderland of farming, and dwelling in dark woodlands in the extreme north added blondness and fair skin.
The tallest people seem to have followed part of haplogroup I-M170. And when it comes to aDNA there are hints that point to the same direction, e.g. some tall ancient human remains in the southern Gravettian ice-age refuges (e.g. Italy).
However, it's mainly tall people from Fennoscandia/Russia (Indoeuropeans and Uralics) who - together with shorter people - constituted the stock from which the technological expansion of the West emanated. This has also led to many misconceptions, i.e. that being tall would somehow be connected to intelligence - no matter how many short geniuses (Einstein etc.) there are. Looking back in prehistory it seems more likely that the opposite is true. However, luckily today we've already messed everything up globally to an extent that it's impossible to tell anything for certain based on physical appearance. So why not just follow James Mallory's Bhuddist advise in the context of Tocharians: Don't believe what you see!
The Vikings, Goths, the Seima-Turbino, phenomenon, Kurgan people etc. are all example of movements of mainly tall male warriors in the first stages. And all of them were closely connected to Uralic speaking cultures.
The unfortunate belittling of first the steppe people and then the Uralic speakers has blindfolded many theories - and maps. Here the Corded Ware culture well overlaps later Uralic areas. Klevius assumes the people there must have spoken relaed languages at the time of Corded Ware.
Haplogroup U descends from a woman in the haplogroup R mtDNA branch of the phylogenetic tree, who is estimated to have lived around 55,000 years ago. An Upper Palaeolithic human who lived in Western Siberia c. 45,000 years ago has been shown to belong to the U* mitochondrial haplogroup. Haplogroup U has also been found among ancient Egyptian mummies excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which date from the Pre-Ptolemaic/late New Kingdom, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods.
Red hair distribution from a northern heartland. The Uralic speaking Udmurts have been described as the "most red-headed" people in the world and having "deep blue eyes".
Blond hair distribution was connected to southern Fennoscandia being
the northernmost place were small scale farming was possible due to the
Gulf stream. However, this part of the farming world was also the
darkest, hence putting immense pressure on vitamin D uptake - resulting
in survival advantage for fair skinned people in the farming/hunting
communities. The northern hunter-gatherers, like Inuits, Sami etc., got
their vitamin D from other sources. 
If, as Klevius working theory suggests, the boost in intelligence, that created the unique paleolithic Eurasian art etc. track from Mal'ta Buret to the Pyrenees, was the result of a Homo floresiensis like tropical island dwarfed brain genetically flowing up in the form of Denisovan to big skulled northern homos, then we would expect a concentration of intelligence genes in the sparsely populated north (because those going back south were diluted by the mass of people already there). Most of these moderṇ (<50,000 ybp) northerners (Siberians, north Europeans) were (and still are) of relatively short stature (compared to e.g. most central and "half-northern" Europeans) and not very fair skinned nor fair haired.
The tallest people used to live in Australia - already some 40-60,000 ybp.
There are two main unsolved mysteries about height:
1 Where did the tall genes originate?
2 Which genes determine earlier and later growth stop?
Mungo Man's "wife" was found 400 m away from him.
These guys from the Burrup peninsula (Western Australia), photographed in the 1920s, were 200.6 cm and 195.5 cm.
However, most Aborigines are of relatively short stature, and the tall guys above were reportedly even less intelligent than other tribes the Western "conquesters" - to use a word commonly used about muslim colonizers - had met with.
Southern farmers were short and not particularly intelligent
It's a myth that - as Klevius still thought 1992 - that farming caused civilizations. It was only when the gains of farming was utilized by non-farmers that the so called "civilizations" emerged in Mideast. Long before this time there had already been advanced civilizations from Ural to Ukraine.Klevius theory on IQ and human evolution and its relation to stature - the first truly intelligent humans weren't tall.
As you dear reader already know, until proven wrong Klevius analysis of the evolution of modern humans is in its shortest form as follows:1 The early IQ track visible through the Aurignacian art/technology track from Baikal/Siberia to the Pyrenees means something extraordinary happened in the Altai region more than 50,000 ybp when the first sewing needles were already in use.
An extremely sophisticated stone bracelet was produced in Siberia/Altai more than 40,000 ybp. Both the needle above and the stone bracelet were found in the Denisova cave.
2 DNA analysis from the Denisova cave has revealed both hybridization between so called Neanderthals, Homo sapiens sapiens, and a third party, the so called Denisovan who in turn is also linked to Australia, Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.
3 Homo floresiensis proves that a bigger skull can shrink in a tropical jungle/island environment without loosing IQ. So if a similar but opposite (i.e. expanding skull while keeping up the per cm3 IQ) process was at stake among the so called Denisovans when they managed to re-enter mainland Asia during lower sea level, they would sooner or later meet with their big skulled northern relatives in the Altai area. As a resukt some of their kids would get both a big skull as well as high IQ. How many of them is up to guesswork so far but there must have been quite a few (proportionally - considering small population) of them to cause such a rapid spread of what we might call the truly modern human over the world.
However, this spread was far from even. Climatic as well as geographical factors played an important role - compare e.g. Mammoth fluctuation, migration and extinction.
When farming emerged population rapidly increased while stature and intelligence decreased (e.g. compared to the early geniuses in Altai). So when the tall Kurgan people from the Russian steppe met the southern farmers the difference in height could be up to half a meter - and some of the Kurgans also possessed superior intelligence due to their mating connections to the north. So whereas mating with average farmer girls didn't produce many geniuses, the opposite was true when it comes to girls/women from the north.
Klevius will teach you more about this scenario later on but in the meantime he suggests you read the Finnish/Karelian epic Kalevala where
Louhi is a "wicked queen" with magical power of the land known as Pohjola (the North). Louhi promises her eldest and most magnificent maiden daughter to the smith Ilmarinen if he forges a Sampo (or Sammas) which was a magical artifact constructed by Ilmarinen that brought riches and good fortune to its holder.
