Here's a curious story from The Telegraph. "Shorter people could blame their lack of height on a shortage of genes, a study suggests." "[R]esearchers believe that missing copies of genes or other sections of DNA could be to blame for up to half of the genetic impact on our height. The genetic abnormalities – known as copy number variants (CNV) – . . . are common but others only occur in a small number of people. [P]eople with more unusual CNV deletions – where part of the genome is missing – have a tendency to be shorter in stature. While everyone has at least some of these deletions in their genome, covering thousands of individual components of DNA, others have several million. Two studies of a combined 12,000 people by researchers from the Children's Hospital Boston found that for every million individual deletions, people lost one eighth of an inch in height." The study, led by Dr. Joel Hirschhorn, was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8910433/Short-people-have-shortage-of-genes.html