[bjourne]

Sure, but making that argument is entering a mined field. You could as well say that skin color is correlated with intelligence because (I'm just making this up) living in Africa was easier than in harsher climates so their brains got smarter.

Btw, it's easy to see if your hypothesis is correct. Just check the heights of graduate males of tough university programs such as medical research, physics, mathematics etc. I belive that the distribution of their heights will be closer to the population average than the heights of CEO:s, top politicians and other "high-status" jobs. I belive it is because those positions isn't selected to solely on merit, but also on charisma or vaguely defined "leadership qualities."

In my experience, with lots of developers and engineers I've worked with, there is no height bias among them. Tall and short engineers and everyone in between. However, upper management and the sales guys are generally tall guys. Now, assuming that height is positively correlated with intelligence, and assuming that engineers are smarter than management and sales people, that observation makes no sense. :) You would expect to see extra tall engineers (because they need the extra brainpower) and shorter management and sales people.