Reply #183: Height is an interesting trait.

[Piltdown13]

It's affected by environmental factors as well as genetics -- and the genetics are fairly complicated, it's not "tall vs. short" in the way it's "can roll tongue vs. can't roll tongue". In your family it appears that women are getting taller, which could be due to the genetic input from the male members of the family or to stochastic variation -- there are also cases of very tall parents producing shorter-than-average offspring. But on a population level, we seem to be evening out somewhat. In terms of large-scale population averages, we're probably about as high as we're going to get; pre-agricultural and prehistoric peoples (heck, even African Homo erectus) were close to what we would consider today's average, and some populations were taller. Agriculture, higher population density, and poorer nutrition pushed population means down, and within the past century that pressure was relieved in wealthier countries. (I'm talking primarily about Europeans here, BTW.)

As far as shoe sizes go (responding to other folks here) -- I thought men's sizes were about 1.5 sizes larger than women's? IOW, I wear a 9 to 10 in women's shoes but a 7.5 to 8 in men's shoes (definitely the way to go for track spikes -- who wants to pay extra for pretty colors?).