Explanations of The Correlation
Further information: Health and intelligence and Heritability of IQThe reasons for the association between height and intelligence remain unclear, but possible explanations include that height may be a marker of nutritional status, prenatal maternal stress, or general mental and physical health during development. As brain size correlates 0.40 with IQ, height/IQ correlation could be merely a side product of taller people having larger heads and thus larger brains.
It has been suggested that the large increases in average height, assumed to be due to improved nutrition, have been accompanied by an increase in brain size which may be one explanation for the Flynn effect.
Studies have shown, however, that common genetic factors influence variation in both height and intelligence, and are responsible for some of the effect, or that both height and intelligence may be affected by adverse early environmental exposures. Two large recent twin pair studies of the height-intelligence relationship showed that both shared environment (59% in both studies) and shared genetics (35% in one study and 31% in the other) are responsible for significant portions of the observed correlation between intelligence and height.
Read more about this topic: Height And Intelligence
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