3 ms·

I wonder if there is actually any correlation between height and IQ among otherwise healthy adults. There are developmental diseases, as well as malnutrition, w

I wonder if there is actually any correlation between height and IQ among otherwise healthy adults. There are developmental diseases, as well as malnutrition, which simultaneously lead to both smaller stature and lower IQ. All of the problems that I can think of which lead to above average height don't really affect IQ(acromegaly, marfan syndrome, etc).

xyzzyz 7y ago
You'll be extremely confused if you only think about very specific developmental disorders. That's not how highly polygenic traits like height and IQ work in general population. Some people are taller than others, and some people have higher IQ than others, and, to our best knowledge, this within population (or really, within cohort) variation overwhelmingly is not due to developmental disorders or environmental setbacks like e.g. malnutrition (though at the extreme levels, severe malnutrition or very debilitating disorders can and do have significant effects), but rather due to lucky draw of beneficial gene variants from the parents. As it turns out, some of the beneficial variants for height are also beneficial for IQ, this is called pleiotropy. More directly to your question, yes, as I said in my previous comment, the effect is very real, and is not driven by some outliers. There have been dozens studies on this, with Ns in tens of thousands. Wikipedia has a sample of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence