[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/did-natural-selection...
Women still prefer many of these physical traits, but probably not as much as wealth, which is linked to intelligence, which comes by default with age.
So you have to factor in what traits are conducive to wealth accumulation, and the easiest and biggest one is probably longevity. If you can be an older, wealthier male with his shit together, that's probably one of the bigger factors over height.
How many short men are getting excluded from gene pool as a result of this?
My take: almost none. They might get "less desirable" women, but otherwise all men and all women are going to pair up.
As for the Rotterdam argument, I suspect fresh food would have to be flown in rather than shipped, which takes weeks.
It's better than hamburgers an coke, or fish and chips and beer, I guess. Which are just as much b.s. stereotypical views of US and British diets as yours is of a Dutch diet.
These two statements I can somewhat agree with, typical Dutch food isn't very special, all we have that could have some appeal is erwtensoep (pea soup) and pannenkoeken (dutch pancakes).
>> The Dutch think of eating as a chore
This is just plain and utter BS though, you couldn't be further from the truth with that statement. You see, Dutch people don't typically cook or go out for 'Dutch food'. Even the smallest towns have a variety of international restaurants and cuisine, supermarkets have a rich selection of international ingredients, cities are littered with shops that sell oriental ingredients, etc.
Tradionally, foods that are popular here (both to eat out or to cook) have always been very varied: indonesian, chinese, oriental/middle-eastern, carribean (suriname, antilles), european (french, italian, spanish), etc. This is probably because of the large cultural diversity of people living here, who brought their food tradition with them.
Of all the countries I've traveled to, the diversity of good food you can have is probably highest in the Netherlands. Compared to for example the US, where food and restaurants (even the expensive ones) are almost universally terrible, the eating culture over here is magnificent. Other countries usually have great food, but less diversity. This all adds up to a dining culture where 'the dutch think of eating as a chore' is an almost absurdist statement. People here like to cook and eat out, restaurants don't try to race you through 3 mediocre courses, straight to the check in the shortest time possible, like in the US, families or friends take time to eat together to socialize, etc. Eating is anything but 'a chore' for most people I know of...
I've heard foreigners being quite fond of 'stroopwafels' though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroopwafel
Depending on the season you can definitely order stamppot or hutspot. In most cities you can even order it and have it delivered, just like pizza.
I've never seen something like wortelstamp/hutspot (mash of potatoes and carrots) with a smoked sausage in any restaurant. That, to me at least, is the epitome of the Dutch kitchen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_cuisine#Foods_and_ingre...
Size is no excuse.
The strong emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables (and fresh mint tea, which is as common as water in Holland) is also really nice compared to the greasy, messy, fatty foods of the U.S. and Germany.
I don't like fresh mint tea myself, but nowadays you can indeed get it literally anywhere drinks are sold.
But there are many more elaborate ways the Dutch make sandwiches that continue to please me.
Finely chopped red and green cabbage mixed with Greek yogurt, sprinkled with mixed dried fruit, a few apricot halves from a can and some chopped canned pine apple (canned fruit because I'm slack).
I wouldn't call it boring, but that has got to be bloody healthy, right?
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21613356-dutch-farmer...
[1] http://www.nltimes.nl/2016/01/26/netherlands-agricultural-ex...
Sandwiches predominate, with not a lot of variety in cooking.
If you look at what people eat for a main course, it's more a cosmopolitan diet really. I suspect fresh food would have to be flown in rather than shipped, which takes weeks.
A lot of the fresh food is grown locally and really affordable, we have one of the largest greenhouse industries in the world.It's probably a combination of genetics, cycling everywhere and eating so many slices of brown bread and potatoes.
Basic statistics also plays a part: when comparing arbitrary groups you'll often see smaller groups as outliers. Both high and low. Dutch population isn't huge (16m) so that is also a contributing factor..
Is there a name for that phenomenon? I saw a similar thing in some data that we were looking at recently, and it took a while to work out that the reason why one group's number was consistently a bit smaller than another group's number was that we were simply taking the max of a smaller group. it's obvious in retrospect, but can catch you out if you're not expecting it.
I'd like to have a name for it, a reference to send people to.
I think this[1] Stats StackExchange answer frames it well.
[1]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/129885/why-does-inc...
> I believe that the Law of Large Numbers explains why the variance (standard error) goes down when the sample size increases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
So what I was looking at is the inverse of the law of large numbers.
If anyone feels like testing this hypothesis..
I'm 6'3" and that has nothing to do with the boiled meats and sugar diet so prevalent in Nederlands.
I suspect its down to breeding more than anything else. Although that doesn't explain such a massive change over less than 5 generations.