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Lack of Penis Bone In Humans Linked To Monogamous Relationships and Quick Sex, Study Says (theguardian.com)
The penis bone can be as long as a finger in a monkey and two feet long in a walrus, but the human male has lost it completely. According to a new report published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lack of a penis bone in human males may be a consequence of monogamy and quick sex. The Guardian reports: Known as the baculum to scientists with an interest, the penis bone is a marvel of evolution. It pops up in mammals and primates around the world, but varies so much in terms of length and whether it is present at all, that it is described as the most diverse bone ever to exist. Prompted by the extraordinary differences in penis bone length found in the animal kingdom, scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary story of the baculum, by tracing its appearance in mammals and primates throughout history. They found that the penis bone evolved in mammals more than 95 million years ago and was present in the first primates that emerged about 50 million years ago. From that moment on, the baculum became larger in some animals and smaller in others. Kit Opie who ran the study with Matilda Brindle at University College London, said that penis bone length was longer in males that engaged in what he called "prolonged intromission." In plain English, that means that the act of penetration lasts for more than three minutes, a strategy that helps the male impregnate the female while keeping her away from competing males. The penis bone, which attaches at the tip of the penis rather than the base, provides structural support for male animals that engage in prolonged intromission. Humans may have lost their penis bones when monogamy emerged as the dominant reproductive strategy during the time of Homo erectus about 1.9 million years ago, the scientists believe. In monogamous relationships, the male does not need to spend a long time penetrating the female, because she is not likely to be leapt upon by other amorous males. That, at least, is the theory.
I'm not so sure I agree. I can't say I have accurate statistics off the top of my head, but I have a hard time believing the majority of people copulate for less than 3 minutes a session. Furthermore, the whole group thing is also improbable - in many tribal cultures, people traditionally engaged together, and even in monogamous societies, humans have sex together an awful lot more than we like to admit.
It probably has more to do with intelligence and social communication, to be honest. The point of it is to help keep your appendage in place, and while I already think it's unlikely it really works that well in humans, it'd have virtually no use if both partners consistently agreed before hand. That's the say, the best use it has is when your partner is trying to get away from you - which probably declined quite a bit as people started to live in larger tribes and developed speech, and thus could decide when they did and didn't want to have sex. Combine that with increasing disapproval of rape, and I think sex simply evolved into more of a cooperative activity for people, and thus a (literal) boner was simply not useful anymore. Imagine if people only ever had each other for 2 minutes a session, from start to finish, how miserable that would be...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
> once you own a plot of land and invested lots of work into it, you pretty much want to limit access to it (and its production),
Aaah the gold old flaws of using projection and 'common sense' to try and know things. There is documented proof that this is not true. It's not even obscure science - it's a book from that era that is still found in every hotel room in America !
*If a man walks over your field he is permitted to leave with all the food he can carry in his stomach.
*The final harvest of the season may not be gathered, it must be left in the field for the widows and the orphans.
* When you gather the harvest from your fields, do not gather from the edges of your fields. Do not gather the *gleanings of your harvest.
* Do not gather *grapes from your *vineyard a second time. Do not pick up the *grapes that fell (to the ground). Leave them for poor people (to gather) and for foreigners (to gather). I am the *LORD (who is) your God.
Those are from the book of Leviticus, part of the mosaic code - one of the oldest set of societal laws of which we have a record. This is thousands of years*after* the invention of agriculture and, and this is important, still several thousand BEFORE the invention of monogamy (which was not invented until the 3rd century AD and even after that remained limited to only one religion for several more centuries).
There is no evidence that monogamy and agriculture is in any way link, and all the evidence we do have suggests that your idea of restricting access to the results of agriculture was utterly rejected (and indeed made illegal) in ancient societies.
You can think of those verses as the Biblical era version of the modern welfare state.
This is also not unique to the Judeo-Christian history - I merely used that because it's well-known but you found similar rules and setups in the Aztec and Inca societies as well. Indeed, everywherre we have written records or other evidence to learn from - we find that agriculture was always a collective process which involved large sections of society and was shared quite freely within that society. The Inca version for example had no concept of money - they traded labour. If I wanted some of your pumpkins you would freely give them to me, and I would promise you a favour at some future date - perhaps helping you plow the field for your next batch of pumpkins.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It does not make sense for a number of reasons. First off, and you touched on this.If you want to correlate a mammalian bone to some societal feature, you need to measure all mammals or a decent cross section.
Secondly, I am not sure how they came to their monogamy theory. All genetic evidence I have seen points to a few alpha males being the progenitors of every generation throughout pre-historic times. Humans like monkeys almost certainly lived in tribes where the alpha male theoretically got every female, but some snuck off with the runner up and because sex was rapid were able cheat. We see somethign similar to this in "monogamous" birds all the time. Where they may pair off, but they have single thrust sex because the entire point is to get every male in a 10 mile radius thinking the child might be his.
From what I understand the science is rather closed. The genetic data is irrefutable, and the physiological programming is clear. We are pre-programmed for harem style mating, women do not just pick some random available mate, they need men to compete for them. And are what is typically called hyper monogamous. The object is to get stable caregivers for your child, but the point like the birds is to get as many stable care givers as possible.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.