Comments on: awesome article: an unbiased look at the shape of the penis

By: figleaf

figleaf — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:45:41 +0000

Hi Violet! It’s still biased. They based their experiments on male and female sex toys. And while dime-store dildos might look like real penises, we both know that however “anatomical” the outsides of penetratables might be, the insides are usually just polished jigs to facilitate removing all that soft, phtalate-rich plastic without tearing.

Real vaginas (like the real human beings who have them) are way more complex and dynamic.

Ev-psych types are generally trolls so look forward to arguments that men have “evolved” to be crap lovers, since pre-orgasmic vaginal tenting would tend to disrupt their semen extraction hypothesis.

If true it’s one more reason for fundamentalists to oppose talk of evolution: given the shape and placement of the penile corona, this extraction action would work much better in women-on-top positions than standard missionary. :-)

I’d almost think that fat coronas would be more of a way to provide girth in the face of those pesky inverse square laws regarding volume and pressure… but that would imply that human women’s preference was ever in the picture, and since that would fit neither The Flintstones or nor the Mad Max views of prehistoric culture the whole idea of women having a say in the matter is anathema to sociobiologists, ev-psychos and their ilk.

If *I* was conducting their experiment I’d have used three types of dildos rather than two: one with a corona and one without, as they did, but also any of the new glass dildos with multiple ridges and bulges. And I’d ask actual women which *they* preferred. Oh wait! Glass dildos with multiple bumps seem to be *hugely* popular with women who can afford them. Which automatically disqualifies it for Ev Psych research.

Penis shape is obviously evolved — there’s way more variety between species throughout the animal kingdom than you’d expect from random chance so there’s no reason it wouldn’t be selected in humans too.

What’s really frustrating about Ev-Psych types is they so steadfastedly resist the idea that humans first became able to do mind hacks when we first started using tools, and that mind-hacks by definition derail predetermination.

figleaf

By: casualencounters.com/blog

casualencounters.com/blog — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:44:01 +0000

I’m with Cyborg. The form seems to follow the function pretty decently.

By: DTU

DTU — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:56:53 +0000

I’m going to have to read the source material behind this article more carefully (when I get chance), but all too often when I’ve looked at pronouncements from evolutionary psychology, they are merely what might be termed ‘arguments from plausibility’ as opposed to actual scientific statements open to experiment and falsification (there’s a very good anecdote in VS Ramachandran’s book “Phantoms in the Brain” wherein, in jest, he gives a conference talk entitled “Why Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” to a group of evolutionary psychologists that was essentially a fanciful argument from plausibility only… only to be met with agreement from the audience! p289 of the Fourth Estate paperback).

Good science has been done in ‘EP’, but there is a _lot_ of merely plausible arguments where no testing either has been done or can be done (since we’ve already evolved, so to speak, the ‘experiment’ has already been carried out, its just we don’t know the experimental method…)

Apologies for the outright geekiness of the above statement! Here endeth today’s lecture!

By: Agile Cyborg

Agile Cyborg — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:50:41 +0000

Um, no, I’ve never, ever scratched my head and wondered why my penis is peculiarly-shaped. It seems perfectly designed to do what it does.

And, yes, I so wish puritans could evolve back into mud puppies- instantly.

By: C

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:01:04 +0000

Those familiar with the arguments over the human penis engineering may recognize this as another “women are receptacles not sexual beings article.” The alternative explanation for the shape and enormous size of the human penis is that it is the result of sexual selection, with females choosing to mate more often with males with the most potent phalluses.