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Objectives The aim was to determine whether an intergenerational trend toward increased stature is slowing down, and whether body weight has recently increased among young men in Poland, as it has in Western European countries. Methods Data were taken from six national surveys of 19-year-old Polish male conscripts from cohorts 1965, 1976, 1986, 1995, 2001, and 2010. Results The mean stature of this population increased throughout the last 45 years from 170.5 cm in 1965 to 178.3 in 2010. However, the average gain in stature per decade declined from 2.4 cm in the period 1965 to 1976 to 0.8 cm per decade in 1995 to 2001, but increased to 1.0 cm in the last period. The average of body weight increased from 63.2 kg in 1965 to 73.1 in 2010 and body mass index (BMI) rose from 21.73 to 22.94 in the same period. The tempo of increase varied in different periods; between 1965 and 1986 an insignificant increase was observed (of circa 0.12); in 1986 to 1995 there was no increase, whereas the period of 2001 to 2010 witnessed a significant increase (of circa 0.76). Conclusions The trend of body size and stature increase within the Polish population, although decelerating, remained positive and steady during the last 45 years. No significant impact of the past half-century's socioeconomic crises was observed in these measures of growth. We concluded that during the economic crises some effective mechanism protecting the living conditions of the children and youth were operating within the population. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 27:704-709, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the about the fallaciousness of the concept of racial types and the damage done to human raciology by "typological thinking." Race is defined by modern evolutionary theory as a breeding population or a group of related populations .Some typologists considered race which coincide with ethic groups as an alleged mark of obsoleteness of the populationist approach. Migrations and mixture blurred boundaries between human populations in many areas. According to the author, there is no ground to reject the concept of racial element s a priori.

The article discusses the process of raciation which is brought about by the operation of the same genetic mechanism which is responsible for organic evolution in general. The emergence of reproductive isolation between two or more segments of a breeding population is important for the process of raciation to set in. The selective value of a particular character in a given environment, the amount of genetic variability available for selection, breeding size of the population, patterns of mating are the determining factors of the degree of racial divergence.