Country singers are massively more likely to be bass than rock singers; there is surely a body size correlation.

Sly Stallone: 5'6", trick photography, and calf implants. But not pretty.

Typical steve to leave out one of the most popular music forms around.

Hiphop Artists (MCs) are notoriously short...I have met many and they the overwealming majority are well below 6 foot. Not sure why...but I do find they are more muscular than rock or country stars, or at least they show off their bodies more (wearing tank tops, etc).

re: selection, the fact that height is a quantitative normally distributed trait is a good clue as the fact that there isn't been powerful persistent directional selection on this. quantitative traits tend to be under weak net long term selection. i bet that during the past 10,000 years very large males were at some disadvantage in agriculture societies where their caloric intake needs meant that they couldn't squeeze as easily through famine. they probably, on average, were higher status and more likely to be able to secure the cals if in an alpha slot, but there are only so many of those to go around.

Oh! Another one of my favourite fertility myths: "...the present-day greater fitness of lesser-IQ individuals..." Yeah, yeah, everyone has heard of this. The dumb breed more. Well, actually, it's complete nonsense. This impression comes from a) people looking at data from the US where patterns are easily obscured by massive immigration and ethnicity/race differences and b) people looking only at the mothers (especially people with a conservative agenda, for obvious reasons).

In homogeneous developed countries the child number indeed goes down with the education level for the females, but it goes up with the education levels for males. Over here the largest families are consistently the ones with the highest-educated males and the lowest-educated females and it's rather likely that those females are higher in IQ than you'd expect for their education level. It's hard to say which way it all goes, but the common belief that welfare inevitably produces dysgenic fertility is clearly nonsense.

The dumb breed more. Well, actually, it's complete nonsense.

No, it is not (PDF):

An OLS regression of data from the 1994 GSS shows that high-income men have more biological children than do low-income men and high-income women. Furthermore, more educated men have more biological children than do more educated women. Results also show that intelligence decreases the number of offspring and frequency of sex for both men and women.

. . . In modern human populations, the demographic transition and the availability of effective contraception appear to have severed the link between status and reproductive success, as previous studies suggest that high-status individuals have somewhat fewer offspring than do low-status individuals (Dickemann, 1993; Kaplan, Lancaster, Johnson, & Bock, 1995, Kaplan, Lancaster, Tucker, & Anderson, 2002; Low et al., 2002; Morgan, 1996, 2003; Pe´russe, 1993; Potts, 1997; van den Berghe & Whitmeyer, 1990; Vining, 1986).

[refs in biblio]

people looking at data from the US where patterns are easily obscured by massive immigration and ethnicity/race differences

The best IQ data available from European countries show the same trend:

American studies, with larger and generally more representative samples, seemed to confirm beyond reasonable doubt the existence of a modest negative correlation between IQ and fertility ( Van Court and Bean, 1985; Vining, 1986, 1995; Retherford and Sewell, 1988; Herrnstein and Murray, 1994; for a summary, see Lynn, 1996a)

. . . The data for other countries are much more sparse and rather less reliable, but at least some European studies have also suggested that IQ is negatively related to fertility (see Lynn, 1996a).

[pp 106-107]

Not just mothers, not just nonwhites, not just the US.

No, it is not (PDF):

busted!!!!

"Hiphop Artists (MCs) are notoriously short"

- I thought they were Notoriously BIG??

It's because childraising is costly and time-consuming for both parents. Without servants, it's hard for a two-career family to raise kids, and more or less impossible if both parents are ambitious within their fields. (That is, all doctors and PhDs were ambitious once, but once they're established some try to rise within their fields, and some just settle in.)

Doesn't this partially support Jaakeli?: high-income men have more biological children than do low-income men.

And this seems to disconfirm the alarmist statements on the topic: the existence of a modest negative correlation between IQ and fertility.

Height does seem to be a disadvantage in famine situations. I'm not sure this is just in agricultural societies either; short guys are probably more efficient (in terms of food input needed to find more food) than tall ones in most hunting situations.
There is also evidence that taller women don't live as long as short ones, which makes me wonder whether the grandmother effect (living grandmother allows for more children) has caused some selection for shortness.
Lastly I would think that cultures that provide more freedom to women to choose their mates would see a lot more positive selection for height. But it seems difficult to measure this freedom; tempting to project current cultural mores in these matters backwards, which would lead you to assume that northern european women had a lot more freedom to choose tall mates than e.g. middle eastern women... but without a lot of historical knowledge you don't know whether this has been true for any great length of time.

I have always suspected that actors and rock stars have similar personalities and drives for recognition as the high school athletes, but they were too small, so they went into the arts instead.

they probably, on average, were higher status and more likely to be able to secure the cals if in an alpha slot, but there are only so many of those to go around.

Right, and alpha-dog roles are high-risk / high-payoff, so expected values are probably similar to below-avg guys. Trying to become a rockstar is also high-risk / high-payoff.

On the suggestion that we look at hip hop as well, here are data on 27 eminent rappers (all data from CelebHeights.com, except for Notorious B.I.G., whose data is from imdb.com):

Rappers

Flava Flav 5'6
Ja Rule 5'6.25
Daddy Yankee 5'7
Nas 5'8
Eminem 5'8
Coolio 5'8
Ice Cube 5'8
Chuck D 5'8.5
Run (Run-DMC) 5'8.5
Mos Def 5'9
Tupac Shakur 5'9
Xzibit 5'9.75
Ice T 5'11
DMX 5'11
50 Cent 6'0
Ol Dirty Bastard 6'0
DMC (Run-DMC) 6'0.5
Busta Rhymes 6'1
Dr Dre 6'1
Will Smith 6'1.5
LL Cool J 6'1.5
Jay-Z 6'1.5
RZA 6'2
Method Man 6'3
Master P 6'3
Notorious B.I.G 6'3
Snoop Dogg 6'3.5

Median = 5'11

The counterpart to "too short to be a jock" in this case is "too short to be survive long-term as a thug." Suge Knight, for example, is 6'4 or 6'5, but he's a bodyguard / hired goon rather than a creator. Also, 5'11 among Af-Ams is probably the same percentile as 5'10 among Euro-Am rockstars & pretty boys.

northern european women had a lot more freedom to choose tall mates than e.g. middle eastern women

you need to keep latitude the same. species in the colder zones of their range are invariably larger because of greater size efficiency in terms maintaining body temp.

Razib, that needs work. Those in the arctic areas are short and stocky (Eskimos). Stockiness conserves heat, tallness diffuses it.

Someone commented that human biology is different because clothing produces an artificial (cultural) environement, whereas furbearing animals live in the natural world alone. Northern bears are larger but also stocky (like all bears). Northern horses, I think, are shorter (often ponies).

Stockiness conserves heat, tallness diffuses it.

thinness rather than tallness. can we get a topologist in the house???

I think that the relationship is mass per surface area. (square vs. cube). At the same weight, the shorter would conserve heat better -- a tall 600 lb. bear would lose heat faster than a short 600 lb. bear. However, a 900 lb bear would lose heat slower than a somewhat shorter 600 lb bear of the same general proportions. It's bigness rather than tallness that helps, since the cube increases faster than the square.

"Country singers are massively more likely to be bass than rock singers; there is surely a body size correlation."

I think you mean baritone, not bass. Basses are relatively rare in the singing world; the majority of men's voices would fall into a baritone range.

You don't have to be big to be a baritone. Frank Sinatra wrote one word to describe himself for Who's Who in America: baritone.

That said, a lot of modern country singers (Randy Travis, frex) strike me as tenors. But I am no expert on the subject.

Rock music's screeching also favors tenors, and even the more melodic rock groups (classic Beatles) tended to sing at the upper end of the baritone range.

The classic Broadway baritone is nearly dead as a doornail: there is one left, Brian Stokes Mitchell. The predominance of high-register rock music singing is yet another example of the triumph of adolescence over mature masculinity. Tony Bennett is 80.

Regarding body size correlation, I've never seen a study on this, can you recommend one? There is certainly NO correlation between female body size and range, as the plethora of enormous great sopranos surely tells us. It's always been a truism in the singing world that certain countries produce certain ranges: Ireland produces tenors, Russia produces dramatic bass-baritones, and dramatic sopranos. No one knows why. My theory is that the language you speak is your first vocal training and Russians who have the capacity to develop dramatic voices get an early start. But that could be tosh.

I'm with Diana -- my strong impression is that most male voices in all kinds of pop music these days are surprisingly high-pitched. They might sound very masculine, gravelly and world-weary, but try singing along with them. I've got nobody's idea of a cavernous hypermacho male voice, but it's a good half-octave or more lower than most of what I run across on the radio, and that includes country music, or country-pop anyway. My theory about this is that higher voices are more attention-grabbing -- they cut through the media and sound-fog more effectively than deeper voices do.

As the person who sent Steve the original list of heights, plus put a lot of the analysis out there, I'll just let you know that I have a follow up on gender differences between Rock and Country over at my blog. Plus I speculate as to why there seemed to be a lot more female rockers during the early- to mid-1990s.

Michael, Diana,

I agree with you both generally.

However, in terms of body size and singing range, have you ever heard of the English singer from the 1980's Rick Astley, who sang in a rich baritone, and appeared in a number of videos. Most people had a hard time believing that this skinny, slightly built white guy, was actually singing the lyrics, and not a stout, Black guy.

Judge for yourselves:
Rick Astley - Together Forever

Why "however"? That's the point I was making. I don't think that body size is a predictor of vocal timbre.

One thing I've always wondered about. Why do people who pose as country singers dress down, but the real country singers who come from rural poor backgrounds always dress to the nines, esp. the women who drip with makeup and jewels? As Dolly Parton said, 'it takes an awful lot of money to make me look this cheap". "Dr." Ralph Stanley always dresses in a suite & tie.

Meanwhile, Joan Baez, whose father was a physics prof. at Harvard, dressed in burlap sacks. All the folkies of the 60s, who never did a lick of manual labor, looked like a bunch of clod-hoppers. Splain that one to me.

I think Hollywood... employs shorter leading men on purpose, so theyre not alot taller than the actresses. Its a kind of political correctness, to suggest the equality of the sexes.

It use to not be that way, it use to be that leading men were much taller and more macho (John Wayne, Gable, Eastwood, ....), but that was before political correctness.

I doubt your conspiracy theory very much. I would guess that short men may have some advantage in Hollywood because actors tend to have huge faces (compared to their bodies), and this kind of disproportion is probably more common in shorter men. But I've read a number of accounts of tricks being used to make a leading man (short actor) seem taller than his partner, which would surely not be done if the goal were some sort of underhanded equality propaganda...

I think slightly feminine (and thereby shorter) "pretty boy" actors like Depp and Decap are popular because they sell to a larger number of women. Manly men may appeal to adult women during a short window of their fertility cycle, but pretty men are appealing a) during a wider window of the cycle, b) to a wider variety of age groups (i.e. very young girls and adult women can appreciate "safe" pretty men, but fewer young teens will appreciate the date rape physique. Young teens are also the ones who went to see Titanic 13 times in a row - so the market is biased to their sexual preferences), c) to a wider international female audience. The developed countries that can pay to go see movies, also may have women genetically adapted to evolutionary domesticated men. Again Titanic worked b/c Japanese women were also willing to shell out the bucks.

On the discussion of pretty boys vs. hunks, I can tell you that Japanese women almost invariably prefer pretty boys to hunks. In the early 90's, the Japanese young women absolutely loved River Phoenix (the early 90's pretty boy who committed suicide), but did not like Mel Gibson or Patrick Swayze at all. All of the J-pop stars and telly drama stars are all "pretty boys".

This is in contrast to the many American (white) women I knen at the time who absolutely idolized Mel Gibson and Patrick Swayze.

I think "women like tall men" is partially a myth. Most women like men taller than them (an average man IS taller than an average woman), but only a fraction have really an obsession with height. This means that on average, the 'best fitness' (if we look at sexual selection alone) would be just a little bit over average height guys. The same goes for body structure: only a few women like really muscular men, most prefer somehow fit and only moderately muscular men.

I believe this height-issue is partly related to US coulture (there was an article about your height obsession...): for instance in Finland succesfull politicians (and businessmen) vary greatly in height and there seems to be no clear trend. If you go to a night club there will be no visible difference between success of (say) a 5'9'' and 6'4'' guys. Overwhelmingly greatest factors in picking up women are good (facial) looks and self-confidence.

Here is a canadian discussion about optimal male height. It seems that females would prefer 5'11-6'. And that height is not TALL, only a little bit over average.

I don't know if there are any good studies done in this topic (height and sexual selection) at all. Questionnaire is not good enough - people say that they prefer intelligent and nice partners (which is not actually true). People don't really seem to know what they want: you have to look the actual choises in a night-club or some dating event.

Only other kind of study (which counted the childlesness levels) I have seen is the one from Poland - which is a bit vague for several reasons (and Polish women I know actually preferred masculin and ugly men to good-looking men, hardly an universal trend). If they would make a height study in India (or Yanomamo, whose unokai show now height trend) they would not probably get any results backing the height hypothesis. Many of the studies also make clusters of "short" and "tall" men; of course we should have to compare the actual heights and not artificial clusters.

Actually, if you compare humans to othe great apes, you can clearly see the declining sexual dimorfism. Most human cultures actually have polygynous marriages, so if the height would have been a great selective factor we would expect a bigger difference in the sizes of women and men, and smaller variation in male height. If selection would have worked in physical combat over females, the short and really tall would have had a disadvantage. We would expect a preference for muscular males (which would correlate more with combating power than height): and this is not true as we know. Humans are pathetically skinny and unathletic; if you have ever compaired an ape arm and your own, you would be convinced by this as well.