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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.
"Scientists are crap in bed: official."
Certainly lines up with my experience.
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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."
Morality and Monogamy have pretty much gone by the wayside. The divorce rate tends to speak volumes as well.
Why is it moral to force people to stay together after they no longer want to? There's no virtue in misery.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Sex has nothing to do with reproduction"
-- Typical Anonymous user logic on Slashdot
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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 hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Chimpanzees do not practice monogamy, yet sex between chimps lasts a few seconds. In a pack or herd animal, the difference between spending a few seconds and spending a few minutes penetrating a female makes a negligible difference to that female's general availability: the male is still not going to be inside her for hours of the day. Oh, and chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
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From a biological standpoint, monogamy doesn't exclude cheating. I am quoting the Wikipedia article on Monogamy here, the numbers are references.
Monogamous pairs of animals are not always sexually exclusive. Many animals that form pairs to mate and raise offspring regularly engage in sexual activities with partners other than their primary mate. This is called extra-pair copulation.[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84] Sometimes these extra-pair sexual activities lead to offspring. Genetic tests frequently show that some of the offspring raised by a monogamous pair come from the female mating with an extra-pair male partner.[83][84][85][86] These discoveries have led biologists to adopt new ways of talking about monogamy.
um...
Kit Opie who ran the study with Matilda Brindle at University College London,
I hope they got a room. But Kit Opie is a male.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
...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.
The immorality of cheating is not always...
That doesn't explain why you think divorce is bad.
Morality and monogamy are both in decline.
No, you have presented no evidence that morality is in decline. Frankly I'm not that convinced about monogamy either unless you're very clear about a decline relative to what.
As humans realize that marriage is more likely going to result in divorce,
That's kind of tautological. You are certainly less likely to get divorced if you don't marry.
I feel the concept of marriage itself will also become extinct.
As far as I'm concerned marriage is basically a mechanism to stop the surviving partner getting massively shafted when the other partner dies. It's also a way to formally build assets as a pair such that a split is fair.
In both cases it's basically there to give some legal protections to someone if something bad happens. Personally I'd be happy for the whole thing to go away and be replaced with civil partnerships across the board.
Celebrities start having kids well before marriage is brought into play
Lots of normal people do too.
and no one gives a shit anymore if they do.
Good! Why should anyone give a shit? If two people have completely separate careers and assets, the legal protections that marriage give don't really amount to all that much: you won't get boned if your partner dies.
That mentality will soon become infectious.
That mentality has already become infectious. And that's bad why, precisely?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
They'll have to rename the species now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your weakness makes me sick.
His weakness? What about yours? You're the one crying about man-bashing, a war against masculinity and left-marxist thinking (whatever that may be). You radiate insecurity that you try to blame on others, and apparently found it necessary to vote for racism and misogyny so you can feel important again. The sickening weakness here is yours.
As humans realize that marriage is more likely going to result in divorce
There are only two ways for marriage to end: divorce (or an equivalent, such as annulment) or death. If people live longer, marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Come on, throw the man a bone.
If logic had anything to do with it, the penis bone would not have disappeared from homo erectus.
Morality and monogamy are both in decline.
So when was this golden age when people were more moral than they are today? Can you point to any actual evidence that morality is in decline? Crime and violence are at all-time lows, so by that measure we are getting more moral.
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.
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.
The fact that this is the reaction you have to this story says more about you than anything else. I'm not sure what studying penis bones has to do with feminism (or Marxism for that matter).
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
The hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Chimpanzees do not practice monogamy, yet sex between chimps lasts a few seconds. In a pack or herd animal, the difference between spending a few seconds and spending a few minutes penetrating a female makes a negligible difference to that female's general availability: the male is still not going to be inside her for hours of the day. Oh, and chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
The idea, I think, is that prolonged intromission gives the egg time to be fertilized before the next dude jumps her. With a baculum, you can stay hard, and stay inside, after you've cum. The baculum of chimps is tiny for the reason you note - they don't need it. In other words it's evolving away, just as ours did, but for a different reason.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Preserving and defending honor and valuing virginity were real fucking things. I've seen color film of places in Europe where an ostensibly bloodied sheet was hung outside the window to prove the new wife was a virgin on her wedding night. This probably wasn't a widespread practice; it was a hick thing to do, surely, but it indicates a wider ideal that was prevalent for millennia beforehand.
The only people who think otherwise are brainwashed feminists who've never read a history book.
I push back against non-egalitarian feminism all the time and I'm a huge defender of western culture, but that doesn't mean we should tolerate this historical revisionism.
Defending western culture, to me, means pushing back against the reactionary conservative blowhards like the OP who pretend we've hugely regressed.
The only people who think otherwise are brainwashed feminists who've never read a history book.
What kind of history books do you read? A few generations ago, virginity was very much valued and rapists were despised in part because of the damage they did (virgin or otherwise) to a woman's honor.
Have you literally never heard a single story about a woman committing suicide rather than suffer the dishonor of being raped? Hell, it happened multiple times just a few years ago with young Yazidi girls. Fortunately, our culture has managed to at least partially outgrow this attitude.
Congrats on the gratuitous Trump and Farage name drops. That just tips off everyone that you are a cretin.
Wow, and you don't even understand the point of those name drops, do you? I mention it precisely because (despite what the hysterical regressive left wants you do believe), those two people did NOT build their careers or platforms on religious and social conservative ideas. I'm pointing out that the OP's arguments are dying out even among the right.
(Trump's anti-abortion stuff being a slight exception here, but there is plenty of room for reasonable people to have secular and rational debates on that issue.)
When the "man bun", skinny jeans, man makeup and other crap came around.
Is it just me, or does every evolution-based hypothesis -- and I do mean, literally, every, single one I've ever read -- seem like nothing more than an effect in search of a satisfactorily matching cause? When did we start coming to scientific conclusions first, and then go shopping for facts that "prove" them? These aren't even testable, now that I think of it. How could you possibly verify the truth or falsity of something like "monogamy caused the penis bone to disappear"? Shouldn't a requirement of a scientific hypothesis be that it can be experimentally demonstrated? Let's leave metaphysics and theology to the theoretical disciplines.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I guess you have never had to hold a crying five-year-old who misses his mommy who left her family.
Mind you. I'm not complaining. Looking in the rear view mirror, divorce was the absolute best thing that could have happened to me. I am way happier being rid of a woman who devolved over the years into a bipolar nut case who refused to stay on her meds. However, the kids all did suffer in many ways being without their mother including suffering from various levels of separation anxiety for years.
If you want objective cases why divorce is bad, divorce results in dividing a home into two homes. It is considerably more expensive to operate two households than a single one. Therefore, all parties suffer financially when resources are spread thinner. Many cases of divorce result in bankruptcy of one or both parties. The result is a drain on society. Too many single parent homes are living below the poverty level. In my particular case, I received very minimal child support ($200 for four kids) and I suddenly had to find daycare and swallow all the associated expenses. We, as a family, had to accept a lower standard of living during those years.
Divorce is not a simple boyfriend/girlfriend break up where everyone walks on their merry way, free and clear, when kids are involved; it gets way messier. Should someone stay in an abusive relationship? No, but don't delude yourself that divorce is a quick simple remedy to relationship problems. My ex has already married and divorced again since we split and her husband ended up in bankruptcy court for his trouble too.
Car analogy: It's like an automatic parking brake. On paper it's better, you don't have to drive around with a great big manual lever right in the middle of the cabin all day. In practice, it's great when it works but really frustrating and expensive to fix when it fails to properly engage. Failure when in use can be both embarrassing and catastrophic.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
you need to measure all mammals or a decent cross section.
Did you read the scientific article? They measured a large number of species, but limited their study to primates and carnivores, as it says in the title of the study:
Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores
within the scientific article they give the details as to how many:
A supertree phylogeny of 5020 extant mammals was used to reconstruct the ancestral states of baculum presence across the mammalian order.
That sounds like a decent cross-section. Five thousand species.
Secondly, I am not sure how they came to their monogamy theory.
Did you read the scientific article? It's pretty well explained there. They correlated the mating strategy of each species with baculum length. The homo erectus link was done by the Guardian article reporter, though.
Primates in polygamous mating systems were found to have significantly longer bacula than those in other mating systems (n = 65, p = 0.032).
and later
Two more phylogenetic t-tests showed that primates in polygamous mating systems and seasonally breeding primates had significantly longer bacula than primates in other mating systems and those without a seasonal breeding pattern, highlighting the importance of postcopulatory sexual selection as a driver of bacular evolution.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Morality and monogamy are both in decline.
So when was this golden age when people were more moral than they are today? Can you point to any actual evidence that morality is in decline? Crime and violence are at all-time lows, so by that measure we are getting more moral.
Are crimes of passion in decline? STDs at an all-time-low? Divorce rates due to unfaithfulness? Pregnancy rates for 4th-graders? Sexting not popular anymore? The availability of every type of porn you can't even imagine streaming from a teenagers cell phone?
This golden age of immorality is now app-enabled, complete with GPS-enabled come-fuck-me radar, so even the marketeers know the rate of morality today, backed by statistical demand.
'Nuff said.
And you sit here and dissect all this, and then try and claim that morality is somehow not in decline, or ask for proof.
That is correct. I don't believe morality is in decline.
Your entire answer is the proof in defending immoral actions
Except the actions I defend aren't immoral.
It's literally become socially acceptable, as you've clearly pointed out the infectious mentality has spread.
There's nothing immoral with having kids out of wedlock. Being married doesn't guarantee a stable home life for the kids and neither does being unmarried preclude it.
Oh look, another app that helps me get laid, complete with GPS-enabled pussy radar.
You are presupposing that there is something immoral about having sex. I don't see why.
The entire concept of marriage is built around a religious construct that champions and fosters a moral code of ethics between two people who love each other.
There was perhaps a period of 200 years where that was the case for a reasonable fraction of people. But even then people got married for all sorts of reasons, sometimes for love, sometimes for strategy, sometimes because they wanted to bang, sometimes because they already did and didn't have effective contraception. Before 1753, marriage in England wasn't even de-facto religious. Rich people got married in Church, poor people didn't.
Marriage has cropped up all over the world in all sorts of cultures with enormous variety.
So, basically cherry picking here.
And you ask why immorality is bad
No, I'm asking why you think these actions are immoral. Immorality is bad by definition. What I don't see is how puritanical Christian ideals are synonymous with morality.
abusive step-parents
Because real parents can never be abusive. True story.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Is the ProTip the type with or without a baculum?