Your friend's parents and grandparents may have had the genes to be tall, but not had proper nutrition as children and therefore not realized their potentials. Genetics is complicated though, so it isn't accurate to say that you should be somewhere between your parents' heights. I, for instance, am almost the same height as my father, but my mother is quite a bit shorter than both of us. Like you said, there are dominant and recessive traits. And height is probably much more complicated than the simple traits used to illustrate genetics in class, that only have one gene.
Height is probably a combination of many genes, each acting in different ways.
So I think that predicting a person's height is a chancy business at best. Theoretically, if we understood all of the genes that code for height and their interactions, we could determine those for a person, and know their potential. That would still be subject to environmental factors. I think it is unlikely to be accurate. Back to the subjects To other messages by this scientist To the general archive Ask a further question based upon this question and answer If you have any question about CVOracle , send mail to the CVOracle mailing list .