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.

The ejaculating erect penises of Bhutan

If the time before the internet were the dark ages, then my formative years in a small industrial town were pre-history because back then we did not even have television.  Heck, we did not even have a refrigerator!

The printed materials, and the few minutes of VOA and BBC provided me a little bit of an idea of the vast world outside the small town.  At home, we subscribed to what I thought then to the best newspaper ever, and to two awesome Tamil magazines.  Father belonged to a magazine club at work,through which we got to read a few leading English-language Indian magazines of those days.  I had enough for critical thinking.

One day, father brought home from his magazine club the tabloid Blitz.  In that there was an article about the Shiva Lingam being a phallic symbol.  A phallic symbol!  It was shocking. And intriguing.

With age, and from a more informed position, I am now the least concerned about whether or not the lingam represents the phallus.  That is immaterial to me.  whatever!  

But, yes, across many cultures, people practically revered the phallus.  Perhaps primarily led by a belief that the meat juice was all that was needed to create a baby.  The periods that women had every month made them "unclean" and inferior, and there was no real understanding of the role that the bloody periods play in creating a baby.  So, of course, the female phallus was beyond the unknown!

Despite the intellectual understanding that I have gained over the years,  I was mildly amused and plenty informed by this NY Times piece on phallus art in Bhutan:

For centuries, Bhutan has celebrated the phallus.
They are painted on homes, or carved in wood, installed above doorways and under eaves to ward off evil, including one of its most insidious human forms, gossip. They are worn on necklaces, installed in granaries and in fields as a kind of scarecrow.

Worn as necklaces, you wonder, right?  Wonder no more:

Caption at the source:
Phallus symbols are worn as necklaces, used as scarecrows and donned by masked jesters in religious festivals.

Unless you are the current president of the United States, you would certainly trust the NY Times, right?

Anyway, back to that NY Times piece:

“Stories of Bhutan’s engagement with the phallus shed light on traditions and lifestyle that make Bhutan one of the happiest places on earth,” Karma Choden wrote in the 2014 book “Phallus: Crazy Wisdom from Bhutan,” which was published here and claims to be the first scholarly effort to document the ubiquity of the phallus.

"The tradition has been widely traced to one lama, Drukpa Kunley, who spread the tenets of Buddhism through Bhutan in the 15th and 16th centuries."

So, "To this day, hopeful couples traverse Bhutan to partake of the monastery’s fertility blessing."

But, it is not only at the monastery:

House after house is painted with phalluses. While highly stylized, they are in some cases graphically detailed: always erect, often ejaculating. One appears with the country’s name, a marketing ploy by the owner of one of the proliferating souvenir shops. The displays in some — rows of colorful wooden carvings — would not seem out of place in a sex shop.

Erect penises. Ejaculating.  On the exterior walls of houses.

Lotay Tshering, a 51-year-old rice farmer, owns a house in Sopsokha that is adorned with two giant penis murals. His wife’s uncle painted them in homage to the Divine Madman, “who has blessed this place,” as he put it. He and his wife have six children.

We construct our own narratives, and believe in them.  We draw artful ejaculating penises on the walls.  We worship shiva lingams.  And there are a gazillion other irrational ways in which we humans make sense of the chaos that this universe is to us.  If only we spent more time sincerely attempting to understand the human condition; instead, being humans, we choose one set of narratives and laugh at other narratives!

Caption at the source:
A family inside the courtyard of a traditional Bhutanese house decorated with elaborate paintings of mythical animals and a phallus.

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

Some science writers are just awesome when it comes to explaining a fine science point to a lay audience like me. First, consider this sentence; isn't this a wonderful piece of writing?

It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living.

That sentence came from this essay on "secrets of the phallus" in the Scientific American.

according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, 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.

It is fascinating that some of the minor anatomical detail about something I see and use everyday was a result of the system adapting to various situations, and then evolving to the tool that it now is. Apparently, "in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does."

In addition to the human penis outsizing that of any other primate,

It turns out that one of the most significant features of the human penis isn’t so much the glans per se, but rather the coronal ridge it forms underneath. The diameter of the glans where it meets the shaft is wider than the shaft itself. This results in the coronal ridge that runs around the circumference of the shaft—something Gallup, by using the logic of reverse-engineering, believed might be an important evolutionary clue to the origins of the strange sight of the human penis.

So, what is the reverse-engineered evolutionary psychological explanation for this? Hey, don't be lazy; read the essay yourself :-)