Charles Darwin suggested it, Hollywood producers have long insisted on it, and British and Polish scientists have now confirmed it -- tall men get the girls.
Their research shows that tall men are more sexually attractive and have more children than shorter men.
"They tend to have more children presumably because they are more attractive. They are more likely to get married and whether they get married or not they are more likely to produce more offspring," Robin Dunbar told Reuters.
The evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in England and his colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw studied the medical records of more than 4,400 Polish men between the ages of 25 and 60.
They found that childless men in all age groups were about three centimetres (1.2 inches) shorter than men with at least one child. Bachelors were also shorter than married men.
The only exception they found was for men born during the 1930s who reached adulthood shortly after World War Two when there was a shortage of eligible men.
"These results indicate that the effect of height on reproductive output might be due to shorter men being disadvantaged in the search for a mate," the scientists said in a report in the science journal Nature.
Their findings support Darwin's theory of sexual selection, an evolutionary process based on preferences for specific traits in one sex by members of the other sex.
"We know that tall men and women are more successful than shorter individuals on average in many different walks of life. What we have shown here is that this carries through to complete the evolutionary equation with those individuals producing more offspring," Dunbar said.
