chimpanzees are apes, like us. :)

Thanks for the tip (with a little coronoal ridge of your own...) on the great article - despite the fact that Slate is a major competitor. Nice of you to "plug" that for them.

OK, OK, I'll stop.

They don't have a breeding season. So there's more than a little truth to the whole infidelity thing.

Which is about as scientific as witch doctors or phrenology. Yet amazingly, every little sociobiological/evo-psych "revelation" is published in articles and reported on TV with the same breathlessness that might accompany a new Moses trotting down from Mt. Sinai with brand new tablets.

The "penis as a sperm removal device" one is pretty old though, I read it years ago. It was stupid then, too. Along with it goes a theory that it also results in men having really big penises, because the bigger the penis, the more efficently it "suctions out" the sperm from the last lovers....bleccch. Of course, all this assumes the female has just had sex, oh maybe 10 minutes earlier, and not dried off or washed or had any run down her leg. In fact, I think it assumes she's just sort of laying there, prone, waiting for the next guy to come along... "Next!"...lol...

Honestly, that sounds more like a prosititute with a line of customers, rather than any couple I can imagine, even a Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal couple. Is evolution seriously designing a system to encourage procreative dominance in random hookups between prostitute and john? Because if that's the system -- as opposed to conscious choice of partner by long term committed couples, who will then raise any children together -- then evolutionary biology is seriously retarded....men don't tend to care for children whose paternity is unknown, and in the "olden days", such offspring stood a good chance of being abandoned or exposed.

As an art student, I got to see more naked men than the average person...and you have to assume anyone who would pose naked feels fairly confident about their "equipment". Yet nothing that I saw was particularly impressive in any way. Once you've seen 10 or 12 of 'em, they all honestly look pretty much the same. Yet, here again in the article, we see the child-like obsession that men have with their penises, and the need to try and glorify them in some way...defenders from infidelity! protectors of sperm! sperm removal devices! coronal ridges! (???)...oh, whatever.

Civilization will have taken a glorious step forward when men, especially sociobiolgists and evolutionary pyschologists, accept that what makes a good father is largely between YOUR EARS and not between YOUR LEGS.

Oh, how I enjoy (as in "enjoy") reading articles that explain how penises (or any other body part for that matter) were "designed" to do this or that.

If you're going to write about science (and frankly, a lot of what you're written here sounds shaky), use precise language. Please. I'm begging you.

Slow news day Salon?

While EvPsych gets abused rather consistently in the media, I think this particular report contains little to object to, and certainly little "glorification" of the penis. Indeed, this study veers only tentatively into the psychological, instead positing evolutionary advantages to physiological design.

Evolutionary design has nothing to do with what makes a man a good father. It has to do with what makes for more surviving children. Those children can be miserable basket cases, but if they, too, breed, then a man is an evolutionary success... even if he's an abject failure as a person. Ditto women.

The idea that penile design removes sperm from the vagina doesn't imply that all women are cheating all the time. It implies that if the tendency to remove sperm has even a miniscule positive effect on the percentage of children of the man with that design of penis that are genetically related to him, that design will be passed on. Not all women need to be rampant cheaters. Very few women need to cheat, and they don't need to do so particularly often. If that shape of penis gives any fertilizational advantage, then over a geological timespan that shape will become predominant.

Honestly, save your ire for the reports which are actually irresponsible. Just because this one is about penises does not glorify penises in the least. (and as for larger penises, it's safe to say that the average male penis length is, reproductively speaking, ideal. Why? Because it's the average male penis length. If bigger or smaller were ideal, then evolution would have tended towards those designs) This doesn't purport to tell men and women how they are, or explain arbitrary bits of human socialization in terms of some evolutionary advantage, it just posits a theory on physical design.

the idea that a man is more likely to want to have sex with his partner when they've been separated for a while because he wants to clear out enemy sperm -- not, you know, because absence made the heart grow fonder or anything.

Actually, it's safe to assume that absence does make the heart grow fonder. Selfish-gene speaking, it makes the heart grow fonder because of this paternity risk; yet individually speaking, it feels like missing the one you love.

Nesse & Williams in Why We Get Sick report on studies showing that a man who has been faithful to but separated from his partner will, when finally reunited, produce copious amounts more semen than if he were either having consistent sex with his partner, or, having not had sex for a while, sleeping with someone new to whom he did not have an attachment. (Nesse & Williams also use this as an indication that, though specific compounds have yet to be isolated, there likely are some sort of pheromonal or MHC or other chemical cues that operate between people on a deeper level than plain old cognition) You can regard this as a biologically dull/icky/unromantic paternity/dominance game if you like, but it can also be regarded as wondrous and beautiful--if a couple is in love, the two of them can permeate and change each other, not just emotionally but on a fundamental biochemical level.