Sex, race, and selection for height

A few papers relating to a conversation I'm not particularly interested in. For the record, in the West:

Selection worked strongly in favor of very tall men, not just against short men. Since there were no hints of any evolutionary check on this selection, these findings suggest unconstrained directional selection for tallness in men. [Evidence of unconstrained directional selection for male tallness]

And:

Height was weakly but significantly related to reproductive success [among women]. The relationship was U-shaped, with deficits at the extremes of height. This pattern was largely due to poor health among extremely tall and extremely short women. However, the maximum reproductive success was found below the mean height for women. Thus, selection appears to be sexually disruptive in this population, favouring tall men and short women. Over evolutionary time, such a situation tends to maintain sexual dimorphism. Men do not use stature as a positive mate-choice criterion as women do. It is argued that there is good evolutionary reason for this, because men are orientated towards cues of fertility, and female height, being positively related to age of sexual maturity, is not such a cue. [Women's height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans]

Whereas, in Africa:

In Western societies, height is positively correlated with reproductive success (RS) for men but negatively correlated with RS for women. These relationships have been attributed to sexual selection: women prefer tall men, and men prefer short women. It is this success in the marriage market which leads to higher RS for tall men and short women. We have already shown that the relationship between height and RS for women is quite different in a non-Western context. In a subsistence farming community in rural Gambia, height is positively correlated with reproductive success for women, largely owing to the higher survival of the children of tall women. Here, the relationship between height and reproductive success is analyzed for men in the same community. For these Gambian men, there is no significant relationship between height and the number of children they produce, although tall men do contract more marriages than shorter men. We conclude that environmental context needs to be taken into account when analyzing human reproductive behavior. [Height and reproductive success: How a Gambian population compares with the west]