Lack of Penis Bone In Humans Linked To Monogamous Relationships and Quick Sex, Study Says (theguardian.com) 279
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.
Or, an alternative title: (Score:4, Funny)
"Scientists are crap in bed: official."
Certainly lines up with my experience.
Re:Or, an alternative title: (Score:5, Funny)
Certainly lines up with my experience.
PROTIP: When she asks if you want a quickie, tell her you prefer the full two minutes.
So .... (Score:3)
Is the ProTip the type with or without a baculum?
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Eh... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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Kinsey said 75% of men only lasted two minutes, and more recent results suggest half only last two minutes, with the average something like 7 minutes. Older (and perhaps less reliable) research suggested no correlation with perceived orgasm quality and duration of intercourse. Both sexes claim that they want intercourse to last longer, but men want it to last longer than women.
It doesn't surprise me that the duration for a large number of men is short. Men's primary biological goal with intercourse is to
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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 l
So 3 Minutes is already "long"? (Score:2)
And without this bone, the standard is much shorter? Fascinating.
Monogamy not that old (Score:4, Informative)
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Polygamy does not have to mean that the females have multiple male partners, and usually doesn't. It doesn't matter how many female partners a male has. He will be just as (un)sure of the parentage.
Re:Monogamy not that old (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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.
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Marriage yes, monogamy - not so much. Marriage in the Greco/Roman world was more of a business deal than anything about sex or romance anyway.
Festivals in honour of aphrodite were basically orgies.
You're poor wife (Score:2)
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.
Yep... (Score:2)
That's why I get boners all the time. Oh, wait...
So monogamy is... (Score:5, Funny)
...B-b-b-b-bad to the bone
Don't think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Funny)
"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.
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No other animal can sweat like we do
Horses can sweat pretty seriously, too.
Sweating works quite well for us because we don't have significant body hair. Most animals have a fur coat, sweating is for them a very bad idea. It would be interesting to know whether we lost our hair first, or started to sweat first. I expect the first.
There are anyway not that many mammals other than us without fur, and the few that are naked like to live in or near the water, like water buffalo, rhinos and whales.
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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.
I agree. We fight as a species and it's simply easier to fight without an erection that can risk harm to the "pass along my genes" organ.
You want one when you want one and any other time an erection is a liability.
The phrase "gird your loins" came about for a reason.
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Think about the biggest 'disadvantage' of having a squishy penis: Men under stress don't get a hard-on and thus can't reproduce.
Except this isn't actually true. First, stress is unevenly distributed among populations, so this only changes who is most able to reproduce. Second, it only takes one male to impregnate a whole bunch of females, so it only takes a subset of individuals who can maintain an erection during stress to keep up the birth rate. Third, there are plenty of males who can maintain an erection during stress, especially for the two minutes it apparently takes to do the deed. Indeed, there are significant numbers of mal
Explanation missing (Score:2)
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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.
Two sides of the same coin. If your gene mutation X gives your descendants an advantage, it also gives your descendants' competitors a disadvantage. A main part of evolution is competition; a warfare against your own species.
Also, if the difference of a mutation is small enough that the advantage or disadvantage is negligible, the genes can survive in some and not in others. Over a large time scale, it can then be random which "neutral" alleles survive and which disappear.
Remember that evolution does no
Not News. Doesn't Matter (Score:2)
Every tabloid web site picked up and ran with this story. What's it doing on /.? It's click-bait garbage.
I learned all I need to know about bones... (Score:2)
from Ali G. See: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yout... [duckduckgo.com]
Ah yes... (Score:2)
It pops up in mammals and primates around the world.
I see what they did there.
Let's all remember (Score:2)
Let's all remember, evolution is largely driven by women's choices in reproduction.
This is where my BS meter pegged (Score:2)
"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.
Finally! A Real Science article on /.! (Score:2)
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
Pants (Score:2)
My bet goes to pants. A bone would make wearing pants so very uncomfortable.
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Men lost it years ago (Score:3)
Hetero erectus (Score:2)
If you are playing the other team. impregnating is probably not your top priority?
Call the Ig Noble Committe! (Score:2)
Re:Not the only thing we've lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Bingo. It's not so much that moral standards have declined, it's just that people are less willing to put up with cheating partners or just prefer not to enter long term relationships in the first place because they see that their parents were miserable in marriage.
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And having to wake up next to the same chick, year, after year, after year.......geez, that gets boring, and with no penis bone, you need something new and fresh to keep you excited and interested!!
Re:Not the only thing we've lost. (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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
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However, the kids all did suffer in many ways being without their mother including suffering from various levels of separation anxiety for years.
No problem. We'll just ban divorce, and you'll be forced to live with your bipolar nut-case ex-wife until you die (probably by suicide). How does that sound?
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.
And how exactly is this worse
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I guess you have never had to hold a crying five-year-old who misses his mommy who left her family.
You still haven't said why divorce is bad. You've said why abandoning children is bad, and you have implicitly equated divorce with abandoning children but that's a false equivalence.
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 l
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...And that's bad why, precisely?
And you sit here and dissect all this, and then try and claim that morality is somehow not in decline, or ask for proof. Your entire answer is the proof in defending immoral actions taken by humans today, because humans simply don't give a shit anymore about traditional morals. It's literally become socially acceptable, as you've clearly pointed out the infectious mentality has spread. Oh look, another app that helps me get laid, complete with GPS-enabled pussy radar.
The entire concept of marriage is bui
Re:Not the only thing we've lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Not the only thing we've lost. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Morality and monogamy are both in decline.
That has to be the oldest complaint in the World. It was probably voiced the morning after the World's oldest profession got its start.
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As we all know, the oldest profession in the (western) world, is breewing beer.
What is immoral with that?
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Crime and violence are at all-time lows, so by that measure we are getting more moral.
This likely has more to do with the aging of the overall population than with anything else.
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I do wonder if the US is actually peaking... LGBTQ rights, women's rights, the way immigrants are treated and more are all deteriorating it seems.
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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.
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What? Are you saying that some guy with a holy book in his hand who claims to speak for the sky God might not be telling the truth? How could that possibly be?
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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.
Blah blah blah, yeah things are so much worse than the days when being raped was considered utterly shameful by mainstream society and being moral meant opposing things like miscegenation or smacking your wife a bit if she got a bit too uppity.
This is why the more reactionary and religious flavors of conservatism have fallen by the wayside in favor of guys like Trump or Farage. I'm not on board with the self-flagellating left, and if you want to argue that society needs improving you'll get very little
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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 hu
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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.
Not so much. Rape has attained a status where it's considered worse than other violations. This serves to reinforce the view that there's some special moral code that should override logic, and sets back any chance of true equality and progress from a world view where women are valued for their bodies, not their minds. And quite possibly cause some women to tip over into suicide, after having society reinforce the notion of how their lives now are ruined forever, unlike someone who was, say, beaten up.
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Rape has attained a status
I'm not quite sure if this is what you're alluding to, but yes it is an unfortunate fact that some people on the left are picking up where the right left off but from a more victim-centric perspective... slut-shaming, but disguising it as genuine concern for all those poor phallocratically-oppressed women. That's a rant for another day.
But I object to any insinuation that this 'status attainment' is a recent thing. It's morphed in character somewhat, but it is in fact
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I agree with all your points.
I just think we still have a long way to go towards true equality and (both sexes) not valuing women for their bodies.
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There's a sane middle ground between social conservativism and self-flagellating SJW 'neo-Marxist' crap and it's really, really simple: people don't get treated differently based on whatever they happen to have between their legs.
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(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.)
Not only that, but it remains to be seen how much of Trump's rhetoric was simply to get votes. It's pretty obvious that Trump wasn't religious in the slightest, and couldn't even recite a bible verse, and probably hadn't steeped foot in a church in ages, yet he cozied up with some religious leaders like Falwell and tried to claim he was a Christia
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I mean, it was obvious during the campaign that this was a cynical ploy, very possibly suggested to him by establishment Republicans, to try to lock down the Republ
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Rape and domestic violence have always been treated seriously and punished severely.
I don't think that came out the way you thought you said it. In my state, spousal rape was legal until a few years ago and you could beat your wife with a stick as long as it wasn't longer than your forearm or bigger around than your thumb.(partially a hoax, partially true) It appears it is still legal to some extent in some places (or just not pursued as it should be):
http://www.womensafe.net/home/... [womensafe.net]
http://www.encyclopedia.com/so... [encyclopedia.com]
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I call bullshit. A mere 20 years ago, police would show up to a house where husband was beating wife and basically tell them to keep it down and move along.
Ehhh... pretty sure that's not true (though there will always be isolated cases.) Severe domestic violence has been punished for hundreds of years in most western societies (although, as Othello demonstrates, society at large didn't always frown on it) and I'm guessing even mild domestic violence probably wasn't officially tolerated post-WWII... but I wasn't talking about law. And neither was the OP.
I was responding to the OP's claims about "morality", specifically intending to allude to the moral asse
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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.
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I suggest biologists adopt a new word, rather than a new meaning for an existing word, which [the new meaning] is the opposite of its already agreed upon meaning.
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morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong
and
monogamy: the habit of having only one mate at a time
And, please, don't confuse monogamy with marriage, many cultures have multiple-partner "marriages".
Just because you make the morally binding arrangement of a monogamous marriage, does not mean Morality and Monogamy are implicitly linked.
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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.
The notion that humans are or have ever been genetically suited to monogamy is a dumb one. We have built societies around monogamous relationships specifically because that ain't so, but they offer certain substantial advantages. Monogamy is more common in more-developed societies, and more-developed societies have different sets of problems to deal with, like more STDs. Some if not all of them entered human populations initially due to animal husbandry... whether taken a bit too literally or not. Some of t
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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.
How is this a "man issue"? It is a scientific study regarding a particular piece of evolutionary history. Do you have an issue? Are you suffering from penis-bone envy?
Re:Credible study? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
I agree, the hypothesis does seem suspect, and I have no problem with someone saying that. I just object to rabid, frothing at the mouth ranting about how it is obviously part of some anti-male plot. The post I replied to called it a study by women about man issues. If the poster had read the actual article, he would have seen that the study was run by a man called Kit Opie.
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I agree, the hypothesis does seem suspect, and I have no problem with someone saying that. I just object to rabid, frothing at the mouth ranting about how it is obviously part of some anti-male plot. The post I replied to called it a study by women about man issues. If the poster had read the actual article, he would have seen that the study was run by a man called Kit Opie.
Depending on the subject matter, and the Trollarenas in here, I heartily suggest taking that little bar right before the comments start, and moving it to hide anything below +2. I don't always do it, but when the assholes are out in full force, I will.
Because Pepe' Trollarena had a successful posting when it pissed you off. Don't feed Pepe'.
Regardless, there is something about the logic of the story that seems odd. I think most of us married/coupled men in here have some idea of what our sex life woul
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Re:Credible study? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
For an otherwise cogent and reasoned posting, you kind of lost it there. Correlation is not causation, or in this case, the correlation may not be perfect since you have identified an exception. Or, perhaps, the correlation is indeed graduated such that the larger the baculum, the longer the intromission (as just a wild-assed guess). Correlation does not need to be 100% in order to observe a valid link.
Indeed, if you read the article's abstract (despite the broken link in the summary), you'd find that th
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OTOH it may help with at least the first penetration, not requiring foreplay or so just to get hard, but always ready to jump on the opportunity. With the bone in it you always have a boner, so to say.
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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.
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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).
Re: Credible study? (Score:2, Funny)
Come on, throw the man a bone.
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As opposed to other room-temperature IQ fucktards being loud? Oh no! stop the presses! Big Red and Triggly-Puff have competition of fucktarditry.
I think we need a UN special meeting to discuss online first world problems because it is super serious.
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lol wut, you think those idiots weren't trolling people with this crap before Trump's election? What lala land do you live in?
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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.
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When the most privileged, affluent, protected people complain about online "violence", unfair treatment in media or vague 'systems of oppression', it doesn't carry much weight.
So we are in agreement then?
Re: Obviously never met a $10 hooker (Score:5, Funny)
"Sex has nothing to do with reproduction"
-- Typical Anonymous user logic on Slashdot
Re: Obviously never met a $10 hooker (Score:5, Funny)
If logic had anything to do with it, the penis bone would not have disappeared from homo erectus.
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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.
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Coincidentally there is no vagina bone.
I think the pelvis counts.
Re:homo erectus (Score:4, Funny)
They'll have to rename the species now.
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Homo Flaccidus? :-P
FAKE NEWS! (Score:2)
Wait a minute. There's no penis bone? Then how do you explain THIS?
https://keimiller.files.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
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Where are you seeing ads? On Slashdot? I'm using AdBlock and Ghostery, and haven't seen any.
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You should be. He's not talking about obvious ads, he's talking about the fake "sponsored content" stories that aren't like the normal stories like this one which you can comment on. AdBlock etc. aren't going to block those because they're peculiar to this site and won't be covered by a generalized rule, so he's providing a new rule you can use to block them (though a responder says that it doesn't work, so YMMV).
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