Let's play ball!

I remind students that there is a really easy way to realize that we don't know a damn thing.  All we have to do is step outside and look at the living and non-living things around us and ask questions.  It is always humbling.

Or, without going outside, to read something.  Like this one.  

Now, before I get into that article, lemme ask you a question.  If you have seen elephants, there is a good chance you have seen an elephant's penis. Right?  Have you seen an elephants balls?  Its testicles?

Have you?

Think about it.  Picture a male elephant in your mind.  Go beyond the tusks and the ears. Look under its big fat belly.  Do you see its balls?

Until I read that essay, I had never paid attention to elephant testicles.  Not that I walk around looking at testicles.  But, yeah, of course, a dog's balls are hanging--unless we owners neuter them.  

Humans have dangling balls.  Elephants are mammals.  What about their balls? "elephants have their testicles nestled deep within their bodies, all the way up near their kidneys"

That’s unusual: In most other mammals, testicles form during embryonic development near the kidneys and then descend, either to the lower abdomen or an external scrotum, by the time of a male’s birth.

So, we have seen an elephant's penis but not its testicles because there is no scrotal sack where the balls hang!

I did not know that!

Biologists have wondered about this discrepancy for decades. Did the earliest mammals retain their testicles, like elephants, or did they let their family jewels drop?
Studying the DNA of 71 mammals, a German team concluded that testicular descent is an ancestral trait that was later lost in so-called afrotherians, a ragtag group that includes elephants, manatees and several insect-eaters that live in or originated from Africa.

Seriously,  how do people ever walk around with an arrogant sense of I-know-it-all?  

Which then led me to wonder ... we men have at some time or another, accidentally--like a ball crashing into our balls--or because of another person hitting us, felt an unimaginable pain when the testicles were punched.  Isn't it evolutionarily stupid to let such an important reproductive member exposed to danger?  Why aren't we humans protective of our balls like elephants are?

I leave that for the interested reader, along with this boner, er, bonus piece.