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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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You might be surprised! My uncle is 170 cm tall, his wife about 165, and two of their sons are about 170. Their third son is nearly 195 cm. Yes, he's their biological child - we've checked!
Both my aunt and uncle had tall fathers and very short mothers. Height is polygenic (multiple genes are responsible), so my cousin won the height allele lottery and inherited a higher proportion of the height increasing traits both parents carried, making him a height outlier.
I'm 201 cm both my parents are both over 6ft
My cousin is 211cm, both his parents are under 6ft.
That cousin isn't even related to the taller side of my family. He's sort of a freak outlier.
I am 197 cm and taller than both my parents or really anyone in my family
Do your family pictures also look photoshopped?
Same boat. I’m 20cm taller than my dad. Do grandparents come into play? I’m really bad at biology
Height is about 80% genetics, 20% environment (nutrition and general health). Grandparent's genetics are a factor since that is where the parents inherited their genes.
A child inherits two copies of every gene from their parents, one copy from each. Your family could be like mine, where my grandfather was quite tall and my grandmother was unusually short, suggesting my grandfather had double pairs of genes for height and my grandmother had double pairs of genes for... not height. Their children, my mother and her siblings, then had an even assortment of tall and short genes.
Her brother married a woman whose parents followed the same tall father/short mother pattern and they had three sons: two of about the same height as the parents (even tall/short gene mix) and one who is about 20 cm taller than the rest (few or no short genes).
Thank you for the detailed explanation. And yep, that’s the situation. One of my grandparents was tall, the other grandparent was short.