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I’m 5’8" and my dad is 5’11". I tell everyone I was malnourished as a teen. It has the added bonus of being a good prank on your parents after telling people for years.
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Submitted 7 months ago by itsmesasha@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world 7 months ago
AA5B@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I have to say, I feel some regret for doing that to my kids. I understand it’s not really my choice and height is a shallow characteristic, but I’m 6’3” and my sons ended up 5’7” and 5’9”. Sure it’s about average but the one physical plus I could have given them, and I married someone 5’2”
HowAbt2day@futurology.today 7 months ago
Make the most of it mate to build a strong personality and you’ll be fine. No more hunting and gathering going on so body size has become irrelevant. You/we got some great explanations here to sort of reason our way through it and at the end of the day, you’ll be fine.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 7 months ago
So many thoughtful answers! WTF is going on?!
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
I’m the father of twins.
My daughter looks a lot like me, but my son doesn’t. My son is going to be taller than me, but my daughter will be my height.
It’s just the genetic lottery.
Slovene@feddit.nl 7 months ago
How tall is the postman?
Fondots@lemmy.world 7 months ago
By 18, somewhere along the line you’ve hopefully had some kind of science/biology class where they talked about dominant and recessive genes, Punnett squares, and all of that
But in case you didn’t, or it’s slipped your mind (honestly, given your age there’s a good chance they may have covered this while you were learning from home during the pandemic, so kind of understandable if you don’t remember) here’s a quick refresher
You get one copy of each gene from both parents. Sometimes you get the same version of them from each parent, sometimes you get a different version.
Let’s imagine there’s a single gene that determines if you’re going to be tall. There’s a tall version of that gene, that we’ll call “T” and a short version that we’ll call “t”
We’ll say that “T” is the dominant version, and “t” is recessive.
What that means is that if you carry the “T” gene, it will always be expressed. You’ll be tall as long as you have at least one copy of it.
Remember, you get one copy of this gene from each parent. They each also have 2 copies of this gene.
Your dad is tall, so he must be carrying at least one copy of the T gene. He might have one, or he might have two.
Your mom is short, so she doesn’t have the T gene, she has 2 copies of the t gene.
So if your dad has 2 copies, all of his children will be tall, because they’re all going to get a T from him.
But if he only has 1, he could have short children if he passes along his t gene instead, and since your mom doesn’t have a T to pass on, she can only pass on the t gene
We can illustrate this in something called a Punnett Square, which looks something like this (apologies for the lazy ASCII layout)
_ | T | T
t | Tt | Tt
t | Tt | Ttor
_ | T | t
t | Tt | tt
t | Tt | ttThe top rows represent your father’s genes, with 1 or 2 copies of the T gene, and the column on the left represents your mothers with only the t gene
And the rest of the squares represent the possible combination of genes you can have.
So in this hypothetical, if your dad is a “Tt” and your mom is a “tt” you have a 50/50 shot of being tall.
This is a very simplified version of it. In reality, there’s not just one gene that determines height, there’s actually about 10,000 genetic factors that have some impact on your height.
And for shits and giggles, let’s imagine that both of your parents were tall so the punnet squares look like this
_ | T | T
T | TT | TT
T | TT | TTOr
_ | T | t
T | TT | Tt
t | Tt | ttIn the first example, both your parents are tall, and all of their children will be tall. In the second example both parents are tall, both parents are tall, but there’s a 1 in 4 chance that their child will inherit the t gene from each of them and be short.
And not all genes are purely dominant/recessive, some are incompletely dominant, so Tt might sort of split the difference in height between a TT and a tt person. Some genes kind of play off of other genes, so maybe in order for the “T” gene to make you tall you may also need to be carrying a “U” gene, for example.
And on top of that, there’s environmental factors, nutrition, illness, injuries, etc. can have an impact on how tall you can be. People today are, on average, taller than people in the past because overall we’re better able to meet our nutritional needs and treat health issues than they were back then.
And, while it’s unlikely that you’ll grow another foot to catch up with your dad’s height, at 18 you may still have a little bit of growing to do, some men continue to grow a little into their early 20s.
So there’s a lot that goes into this.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Lazy ASCII layout
Proceeds to do the best possible job with the tools at hand.
I see you.
nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
My brother is 10cm / 4 inches taller than me. There is a random component to height too.
BillDaCatt@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Based on what I remember from my biology class, many traits are decided by dominant vs recessive genes. The genes in your DNA are arranged in pairs. Your parents each provide you with one half of that pair.
- Recessive genes require both genes to be the same to be expressed.
- Dominant genes only require one to be expressed.
Let’s assume that tallness is the dominant gene and being shorter is the recessive gene.
If your father has one gene for being more than 182 cm and one gene for being less than 170 cm, he will be tall because the gene for tallness is dominant. If your mother has two genes that both select for being less than 170 cm tall, she will be noticeably shorter than your father because she has two recessive genes.
If your father gave you his recessive gene and your mother gave you one of her recessive genes, you would be noticeably shorter than your father.
This can also happen when both parents are tall but each of them carries both the dominant (tallness) gene and the recessive (shorter) gene. If they each provide only the recessive gene to their offspring, the result is an offspring that is significantly shorter than their parents.
traceur301@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 months ago
Biology is super complex. If simply averaging the traits of the parents is how it worked one might expect every child to have a body in between male and female as well
Successful_Try543@feddit.org 7 months ago
one might expect every child to have a body in between male and female as well
No, one would expect the male children to grow to a body size somewhere between their dad and their mom’s brother.
SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Human sex is not binary but bimodal; we are all, to varying measurable degrees, part male and part female. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10842549/
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
How tall is your mom?
Also, calories and nutrients during childhood affects height in the long term.
SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Nutrition is childhood is something so insanely overlooked it is appalling
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 7 months ago
There’s a lot of “should”, but that’s not the way it works.
The genes usually take one thing from dad, one thing from mom etc. but it happens not so often that they mix both to find the “mean value” or something.
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 7 months ago
I’m not a geneticist, I don’t even play one on TV. But i’m fairly confident in saying: evening out? That’s not how this works. When your daddy’s sperm combined with your mother’s egg, a whole host of chance processes happened to make up your genes. It’s random as far as I can tell. It isn’t just averaging out between them.
Steve@startrek.website 7 months ago
Maybe ask your real dad