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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.
who, for another 5, will do everyone in the room.
Studies by women about man issues warrants 0% credibility.
We all know that these feminist have a political agenda of man-bashing. There's an all out war against masculinity by female marxist all around the world. ./ that I started reading in 1999, is now very inflitrated by left-marxist thinking.
Considering the fucking-around I've been doing lately, this research seems plausible.
Wife is not amused.
This isn't related to the article, but you can't comment on sponsored content, so I'm posting here.
The following ublock rule kills sponsored content DEAD:
article[class*="ntv-sponsored"]
So, the homo erectus lost the penis bone?
Given the popularity of cheating by members of either sex, I'd say the penis bone isn't the only thing we've lost. Morality and Monogamy have pretty much gone by the wayside. The divorce rate tends to speak volumes as well.
How ironic we were just talking about Ashley Madison's slap-on-the-wrist punishment to bolster their still-going-strong stance in our world today...
"Scientists are crap in bed: official."
Certainly lines up with my experience.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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."
And without this bone, the standard is much shorter? Fascinating.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Their dates seem off. I thought that monogamy in humans had emerged with agriculture: 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), so that means only to your kids, and to be sure the kids are yours you pretty much have to be monogamous. See all the still existing tribes of hunter gatherers that practice polygamy.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
the act of penetration lasts for more than three minutes
By that logic, all men should still have their bones. Cause, if you're lasting less than three minutes with the same woman for how many years I am so very sorry.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
That sounds fishy. Someone needs to do a study to see if cheating females partners didn't last 3 minutes
Monogamy linked to the lack of boner!
Yup, thats kind of the point!
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.
Spending less than 3 minutes penetrating the female pretty much guarantees she will seek penetration elsewhere. I don't think this study is credible.
That's the point of the erectile penis across the entire mammalian family, the existence of a baculum is irrelevant.
Normal human intromission is 2 - 5 minutes, suggesting most males offer 3 minutes without a baculum in sight. If you want to marvel at the human penis, ask why the shaft is covered in skin when other mammals expose areola tissue.
That's why I get boners all the time. Oh, wait...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Stop discrediting the word "theory". This is hypothesis.
...B-b-b-b-bad to the bone
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I wondered how long it was going to take for me to lose all faith and give up on this site. And now, in the new /. regime, I have to wade past a story about why we don't have BONES IN OUR DICKS to get to the actual technology news that's the only reason I ever kept coming here.
I'm done. Someone find me a tech news site that will treat me like I have a gorram brain, without clickbait bullshit. I'll support it. But I'm done here.
Cold may have something to do with the bone size as well. If I remember correctly, a polar bear had a bigger penis bone than a bear in a warmer climate. Walrus is a creature of the cold as well. The modern human was evolving in harsh, dry and hot areas of the world, of which the relative lack of hair is a good indicator. Prolonged copulation might also get you eaten in the warmer climates with more active and numerous predators.
I snapped it off in your mom. (oh, and my captcha was "outlast")
This is just one more article that proves that the old Slashdot I first joined is dead and buried. You know, the one with the motto "news for nerds, stuff that matters".
Because this surely isn't anything that is relevant to a true-blood mom's basement-dwelling nerd.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
about the sexual stamina of the researcher's husband.
I think it's a different selector.
Think about the biggest 'disadvantage' of having a squishy penis: Men under stress don't get a hard-on and thus can't reproduce. This could've emphasized and benefited populations with lesser stress and more room to develop higher skillsets to surpass a potential human branch with real boner.
It could also be for 'economic' reasons. Humans are built and optimised towards long-distance running. No other animal can sweat like we do. A bushman (or any other non-obese halfway trained human) can run an antelope to 'death by bodyheat and/or exhaustion'. That is a pretty awesome raw survival skill innate to homo sapiens. I suspect lugging a bone penis dangling between your awesome running legs might actually be quite cumbersome - since it's mostly men doing the running and the ladies nourishing big-headed babies (that need special attendance and culture as extended brain + serious actual brain nutrition) after laboriously squeezing them out of a notably narrow birth canal.
Also we only need our penis once in a while. Having a lightweight retractable one is generally quite practical from an evolutionary perspective. Also I suspect the squishiness prevents injuries and infections better than a true boner would. Wales float. They don't have to worry about their boner bumping and scraping on the ground or on rocks.
Bottom line:
You needn't go to far to get a handle on what's up with the squishy penis - the answer is probably quite simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The explanation given explain why it would not be selected FOR, but it does not explain why it would be selected against. My biology knowledge may be rusty, but IIRC to have something disappear like that, you need to have it selected against.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Every tabloid web site picked up and ran with this story. What's it doing on /.? It's click-bait garbage.
Got wood?
For natural selection to remove a feature there must be not only a reason it is no longer an advantage but also a reason that it is now a disadvantage in terms of fitness.
from Ali G. See: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yout...
Those "scientists" are rationalizing in a highly theoretical way, or maybe they need hotter girlfriends.
It pops up in mammals and primates around the world.
I see what they did there.
Let's all remember, evolution is largely driven by women's choices in reproduction.
-Styopa
Moden man, not so much.
"penis bone length was longer in males that engaged in what he called "prolonged intromission.""
Humans have selected for monogamy with a higher level of sexual enjoyment than any other species because of our extremely long maturation time, with its need to keep couples together for the twenty years it takes to bring offspring to maturity. If a baculum were to help with this, we would still have one.
"The penis bone, which attaches at the tip of the penis rather than the base"
This is the real news here. That is CRAZY!
Other studies have shown that the shape of the human penis is designed to remove the previous male's sperm, arguing against monogamy. Some studies claim that the majority of human sperm is "killer sperm", designed to kill other men's sperm, again arguing against monogamy. /.!), indicating a very polygamous society.
Also recent DNA studies have indicated that back in the Ice Age only one in 10 or 12 males actually procreated (it was on
I think proving monogamy in human history would be very difficult.
Just posting this as a curiosity, but one of our Sunday School teachers at Church came along something interesting while preparing for a lesson. He somehow got sidetracked into some of the lesser known Jewish teachings (can't remember the Hebrew name for these,) and found this theory about Adam and Eve. The theory said that God took not a rib from Adam to create Eve, but rather Adam's penis bone. This explains not only the lack of a baculum in humans but also the reason the scrotum has a ridge of tissue in the middle to symbolize the scar Adam incurred from its removal. It at least made for a light-hearted start to Sunday School that morning.
Just kidding. Not so much.
Personally, I think we evolved without it when we took to walking upright. A penis bone would have kept all male penises pointing up at the angle of optimum intromission. This would have forced all males to urinate in long rainbow arcs that got piss all over the place in a highly conspicuous way and would have made the penis, sticking out and up right up front, highly vulnerable to all sorts of weapons as tribal man fought one another. Hard to tuck the junk back and out of risk when you are standing if you have to break a bone to do it. Humans are also enormously mutually fertile (roughly 10% of the time) and live a very long time, so long intromission, short intromission, neither one is going to be effective at ensuring "monogamy" and of course arguing that human culture is monogamous even today is pretty much to make a RELIGIOUS argument as the best that can be supported empirically is some mix of serial monogamy, serial polygamy, serial polyandry, and just plain fucking around with a smattering of true "lifetime exclusive" monogamy mixed in, maybe 10 or 20%. Swans may mate for life, but humans are lucky if they mate for dinner, if one follows overt statistics, and even that is probably driven more by religious memes than by "nature". The memes are rather at war with the genes, and different cultures follow different patterns for optimizing mate selection worldwide.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Twas no rib Adam was forced to give up. Man's been payjng for it ever since.
The notion that paleolithic hominids were in any sense monogamous is risible.
> the penis bone is a marvel of evolution. It pops up in mammals and primates around the world,...
[See what they did there?]
"The penis bone can be as long as a finger in a monkey..."
One important factor not mentioned is female preference. It's entirely possible that our human female ancestors preferred the non-boned penis for variety of reasons, and selected those males and drove evolution.
No woman I have ever had sex with was monogamous, they all fucked around behind my back. They want guys who are monogamous, but they want the freedom to fuck whenever, whoever they wish and no consequences. Makes me wish I was asexual or gay.
So, in response to the article's statement, " ... she is not likely to be leapt upon by other amorous males.", I respond, "Don't you mean for the amorous female to leap upon whatever erect penis is in the vicinity?"
ODE TO AN OOSIK
Strange things have been done in the Midnight Sun,
and the story books are full---
But the strangest tale concerns the male,
magnificent walrus bull!
I know it's rude, quite common and crude,
Perhaps it is grossly unkind;
But with first glance at least, this bewhiskered beast,
is as ugly in front as behind.
Look once again, take a second look -- then
you'll see he's not ugly or vile --
There's a hint of a grin, in that blubbery chin --
and the eyes have a shy secret smile.
How can this be, this clandestine glee
that exudes from the walrus like music?
He knows, there inside, beneath blubber and hide
lies a splendid contrivance -- the Oosik!
"Oosik" you say -- and quite well you may,
I'll explain if you keep it between us;
In the simplest truth, though rather uncouth
"Oosik" is, in fact, his penis!
Now the size alone of this walrus bone,
would indeed arouse envious thinking --
It is also a fact, documented and backed,
There is never a softening or shrinking!
This, then, is why the smile is so sly,
the walrus is rightfully proud.
Though the climate is frigid, the walrus is rigid,
Pray, why, is not man so endowed?
Added to this, is a smile you might miss ---
Though the bull is entitled to bow --
The one to out-smile our bull by a mile
is the satisfied walrus cow!
(Anonymous)
My bet goes to pants. A bone would make wearing pants so very uncomfortable.
Yup
I remember as a little girl in primary school getting into rather a lot of trouble when I found a picture of a skeleton, pointed to a suggestively located bone (probably the coccyx) and gleefully, repeatedly, and loudly announced to my classmates "IT'S THE WILLY BONE!!!", going round the classroom with the picture to share knowledge of my thrilling discovery. My teachers apparently didn't see the amusement of a little girl so gleefully sharing this erroneous notion, and their response was simply to tell me off rather than explain my misconceptions... which of course just made little me all the more adamant about making sure everyone in my class knew I'd found the willy bone.
When the "man bun", skinny jeans, man makeup and other crap came around.
It pops up in mammals and primates around the world
Wait a minute. There's no penis bone? Then how do you explain THIS?
https://keimiller.files.wordpr...
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you are playing the other team. impregnating is probably not your top priority?
A more simple explanation would be rape.
A bone would make it much easier to be hard enough to force your way in... which would also explain why it is hard at the tip, not the base.
Cheating is so much easier if sex is quick. This leads to more genetic diversity even if you are pretending to be monogamous.
While Gronk goes to the latrine, Gronk's wife gets impregnated by someone else.
We have a new candidate.
In shorter sex, women don't have to fake an orgasm for as long a time. This saves a lot of wasted energy on the women's part!
It fails the sanity check when it says we are monogamous as a species.
Sure we see lots of morality "science" that says that but when we look back (our out our window) our species is not monogamous.
The article this article links to, says that all women are straight (The male will have many partners but the woman will have one) which is pretty much the opposite of their nature.
Through out much of our evolution the strong males had many partners.
Monogamy is a religious business decision. You can get those men who women find to be unacceptable, to join your religion if you promise each of them the right to a woman.
Kind of awful for women but it paid out huge for the powerful religions of the west.
Also terrible for our species as the genes that women in the past would have decided should not go forward are now passed on.
Maybe it's just because we walk in an upright position...
there was a study saying recently, that compared to animals, we do it is waaay more positions. That can explain the bone stuff too.
I mean: we lost our hair due to clothing and other; we changed our guts because of the food we eat (cooked).
my 2 cent.
Different bones, different skeletons. Humans and primates are completely different.
Just like Darwin couldn't accept genetics because it was proposed by a guy who was a deeply committed Christian, modern biologists cling to evolution more for their own religious aversion than anything else.
Evolution is a theory in crisis. How many neanderthal bones do we have that are not completely contested even by the neo-darwinists themselves? None. How many fake/hoax intermediate species have we hard about? Many (Piltdown man, Java man, etc)! What percentage of Americans believe we evolved from primates? Not much more than 40-42%.
Evolution is a story told by scientists to let other scientists know how professional they are. Just like the grown ups in The Emporer's New Clothes who say, "Oh, those robes! How exquisite!" When there was nothing there.
You should see some of the recent interviews Ben Stein has done with evolutionary biologists. They account for the HUGE improbability of their theory by positing special rays from aliens or fantasy (i.e. not science) like that.
I feel sorry for people who think we evolved from primates. They are completely out of touch with the question of whether or not they believe what they say and are a moral hazard to themselves and others.
Coincidentally there is no vagina bone.
I think the pelvis counts.
Men have vagina bones too?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Is the ProTip the type with or without a baculum?
If you think that everyone is monogamous, you are delusional.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
"It pops up" hehehehe
You see, Adam had a penis bone. But he was lonely and wanted a mate. God took pity, and built him a woman from his penis bone.
The early Christian writers changed it to "rib bone" because think of the children.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
That was the first mistake the 'scientists' made.
A penis bone would have kept all male penises pointing up at the angle of optimum intromission. This would have forced all males to urinate in long rainbow arcs that got piss all over the place in a highly conspicuous way and would have made the penis, sticking out and up right up front, highly vulnerable to all sorts of weapons as tribal man fought one another.
This is about the best proposed explanation I have read so far. Not walking on all fours mean we don't need the penis sheath for protection against brush, branches and things. I wonder if the two (baculum & sheath) are evolutionarily related and when you don't need one you don't need the other.
Less likelihood of another male mounting her? These guys didn't know my ex.
Wow, talk about wham bam thank-you-'mam!
That's not me. At just 3 minutes, why even bother? A guy should at least do 1/2 hour.
I know, I know. I'm not like other guys. Of course it probably helps that my wife is very flexible and can ride me like a horse. Likes to ride me like a horse.
Having reproductive organs sticking out during a battle became a liability and those who survived were the ones who did not present such an obvious target. Not to mention the advances in clothing and animal husbandry. Why migrating to colder climates would have frozen those with a penis bone out of the gene pool.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam considered modern sexual relations between husband and wife as a spiritual act and enlighten. Traditional marriage and concubinage change over time along with the consensus view of sexual behavior is acceptable. The teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism on sexuality have different interpretations. Buddhism teaches "curb adultery", which the explanations and definitions vary by individual. However, there are many smaller religious groups with different views on sexual behavior are acceptable and banned several groups monk or nun sex. another study that you might be interested in (https://goo.gl/zuPgcQ)