my inappropriate sense of humour strikes again!

[lauzeta]

Linkage!

A very interesting article on Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, AKA the question that's been keeping you all awake at nights.

It is really interesting, seriously, at least if you have a minor interest in evolutionary biology. Also, hilarity:

Even the most well-endowed chimpanzee, the species that is our

Comments

[tuff_ghost]

LOL, this guy's a dick (hurr hurr hurr) but he asked exactly the question I was thinking the whole time while reading

Another obvious fact ignored by these nincompoops is that if it's genetically advantageous for a human male to root out another male's sperm, why would it not be equally so for other primates?

further LOLs, someone walked in on me at work while I was reading this. I only started the jerb on Monday.

Nothing happened :D

[lalaithlockhart]

GAH!
Ohh maaaan. That shouldn't be funny, but it really is.

[musakura]

Interesting! I feel... edified? I laughed out loud at the part of the article describing how they concocted simulated semen and then used sex toys to test the semen displacement theory. Now THAT's a party game!

[lauzeta]

Science is weird.

[jeppa]

Sexual characteristics are a super-interesting part of evolution. Did you know that the more promiscuous the female is of any species, the higher the likelihood that the males of that species will have larger scrotums (larger by percentage of body mass)? For the same reason as they discuss here: the more sperm you have, the better you can compete with other dude's sperm inside the female.

Also, the amount of sexual dimorphism (difference in size/appearance between male and female) is directly correlated to the size of the male's harem. The less sexual divergence, the more likely that the species is serially monogamous. Isn't that coooool?

I get irritated by evo-psych sometimes because it always shows up in really bad science journalism. "Men are hunters and woman are gatherers so women don't belong in the workplace durr hurr hurr I'm not misogynist it's just SCIENCE."

But this article had the right spirit: honest curiosity mixed with humour.

[lauzeta]

I did not know either of those things! Do you know if there's any speculation as to why the second one is the case?

I completely agree about this article - the tone of it was a huge part of why I found it interesting enough to link.