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.

Comments

Or, an alternative title:

[DeathToBill]

"Scientists are crap in bed: official."

Certainly lines up with my experience.

Re:Or, an alternative title:

[AmiMoJo]

Certainly lines up with my experience.

PROTIP: When she asks if you want a quickie, tell her you prefer the full two minutes.

Eh...

[EmeraldBot]

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...

Re:Eh...

[AvitarX]

I wonder then if it has nothing to do with monogamy, and perhaps the opposite in a sideways kinda way

The human glans is believed to be like a cum plunger, and the reason we become super sensitive after cumming is so we don't keep trusting and plunge out our cum.

The human pens is pretty weird in general, it's a funny inbetween length on the monogamy nononogamy scale, and relatively boring, but quite girthy. The premise of major monogamy for two million years goes against a lot of what o read though, things like the cum plunger and moaning during sex point towards non monogamy as the thing more recent than that in evolution.

Re:Not the only thing we've lost.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re: Obviously never met a $10 hooker

[FyRE666]

"Sex has nothing to do with reproduction"
  -- Typical Anonymous user logic on Slashdot

Monogamy not that old

[dargaud]

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.

Re:Monogamy not that old

[silentcoder]

> 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.

Re:Credible study?

[TheRaven64]

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.

So monogamy is...

[hyades1]

...B-b-b-b-bad to the bone

Re:Not the only thing we've lost.

[serviscope_minor]

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?

Don't think so.

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:Don't think so.

[Applehu Akbar]

"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."

You, ahem, nailed, a possible reason for 'idiocracy' in the long run: husbands with demanding, high-stress jobs getting outcompeted in the bedroom by the lackadaisical pool guy or barista.

Re:homo erectus

[Black Parrot]

They'll have to rename the species now.

Re: Obviously never met a $10 hooker

[Anonymous Coward]

If logic had anything to do with it, the penis bone would not have disappeared from homo erectus.

Re:Not the only thing we've lost.

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Credible study?

[wisnoskij]

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.

Re:Credible study?

[pz]

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.

Re:Not the only thing we've lost.

[serviscope_minor]

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.