Believe it or not I didn’t actually think that it was always the case that the older sibling would be taller. The title of the thread is a summary of the contents, not the complete question, if it were then there would be no text in the OP. The actual question I asked was:
“Is there any statistical evidence to show that the first born of male siblings remains taller when both are fully grown and if so why is this the case?”
That is a question that cannot be answered anecdotally, sorry if I didn’t make it clear which part was the actual question I was curious about
Thanks for the link Colibri, I certainly didn’t expect it to be the other way around. Any idea how big their sample was for that study or where it took place?
Personally, I didn’t expect there to be any statistical difference at all, and I wouldn’t take one study to be definitive. That’s all I was able to find on a quick search, though. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the full text article, so I’m not sure how large their sample was. The researchers are apparently based at a children’s hospital in Germany.
Anecdotal of course, but a quick poll in the office this morning turned up six men (of whom I’m one) who have older brothers. All six are shorter than their older brothers.
All of them only have one brother? This would suggest that it is very rare for there to be more than two male siblings in a family.
As long as we are being anecdotal, I have four brothers. Our relative heights compared to birth order are 3, 5, 2, 1, 4. So of the 4 who have older brothers, 2 have at least one older brother who is taller and 2 do not.
More anecdotal evidence - my mum has 4 brothers - in order of height - youngest, oldest, 2nd oldest, 2nd youngest - ranging from about 6’2" to about 5’10"
The boys are numbers 3-6 in the family, and the youngest is the youngest by 20 minutes… The 2 oldest are girls, and they’re shorter than all the boys…
I don’t mean to pick on you, but I still don’t see a clear question beyond that which we inferred. For first-born males to remain taller, they first have to be taller. Obviously the first-borns will be taller than their brothers when the latter are infants, but that has nothing to do with the fact that they are first-borns, only with the fact that they are older and both brothers are still children. Surely you’re not asking a question as senseless as “if A is born before B, will A always be bigger than B?” So please, what are you asking?
I simply wanted to know if there is a statistical trend for the first born of male siblings to be taller than their younger sibling when both are fully grown. Of course anecdotal evidence can be provided to confirm or deny the small sample available to me and my friends in the pub so I was looking for a more conclusive survey, something along the lines of: We measured the heights of 10,000 pairs of male siblings and discovered that 65% of the time the older sibling was taller than the younger when both were fully grown.
The link Colibri supplied would suggest the opposite, younger siblings tend to be shorter when both are fully grown though that survey doesn’t state how big the sample taken was.
According to the abstract: “Males tend to increase in height with increasing birth order…” So it says that younger adult male siblings tend to be taller not shorter.
