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Excerpted from "WHY IS THE PENIS SHAPED LIKE THAT? …And Other Reflections on Being Human" by Jesse Bering. Published July 7th by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2012 by Jesse Bering. All rights reserved.
If you’ve ever had a good long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over its peculiar shape.
Let’s face it: it’s not the most intuitively configured appendage in all of evolution. But according to the evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality. If you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.
Gallup’s approach to studying the design of the human penis is a perfect example of reverse engineering as the term is used in the field of evolutionary psychology. That is to say, if you start with what you see today—in this case, the oddly shaped penis, with its bulbous glans (the “head,” in common parlance), its long, rigid shaft, and the coronal ridge that forms a sort of umbrella-lip between these two parts—and work your way backward regarding how it came to look like that, the reverse engineer is able to posit a set of function based hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory.
If you’ve ever had a good long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over its peculiar shape.
Let’s face it: it’s not the most intuitively configured appendage in all of evolution. But according to the evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality. If you think there’s only one way to use your penis, that it’s merely an instrument of internal fertilization that doesn’t require further thought, or that size doesn’t matter, well, that just goes to show how much you can learn from Gallup’s research findings.
Gallup’s approach to studying the design of the human penis is a perfect example of reverse engineering as the term is used in the field of evolutionary psychology. That is to say, if you start with what you see today—in this case, the oddly shaped penis, with its bulbous glans (the “head,” in common parlance), its long, rigid shaft, and the coronal ridge that forms a sort of umbrella-lip between these two parts—and work your way backward regarding how it came to look like that, the reverse engineer is able to posit a set of function based hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory.
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