Friday - April 12, 2013

A Belated April Fool’s?

I’ve had fun in the past on a couple other blogs with the monthly magazine released by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In their infinite wisdom, they named their publication

the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

and refer to it by the acronym. In short (ahem), it’s PNAS magazine.

And I’ve noted lately in another blog, how filling up the hungry maw of the ever hungry 24/7 News Cycle often leads to news stories that seem to be nothing more than the blatantly obvious ... which is wryly amusing ... but sometimes things seem to go a bit too far.

Like this one. A big long one in this month’s PNAS magazine, on big penises. Hey, it’s science! Show respect!

Penis size interacts with body shape and height to influence male attractiveness

Abstract

Compelling evidence from many animal taxa indicates that male genitalia are often under postcopulatory sexual selection for characteristics that increase a male’s relative fertilization success. There could, however, also be direct precopulatory female mate choice based on male genital traits. Before clothing, the nonretractable human penis would have been conspicuous to potential mates. This observation has generated suggestions that human penis size partly evolved because of female choice. Here we show, based upon female assessment of digitally projected life-size, computer-generated images, that penis size interacts with body shape and height to determine male sexual attractiveness. Positive linear selection was detected for penis size, but the marginal increase in attractiveness eventually declined with greater penis size (i.e., quadratic selection). Penis size had a stronger effect on attractiveness in taller men than in shorter men. There was a similar increase in the positive effect of penis size on attractiveness with a more masculine body shape (i.e., greater shoulder-to-hip ratio). Surprisingly, larger penis size and greater height had almost equivalent positive effects on male attractiveness. Our results support the hypothesis that female mate choice could have driven the evolution of larger penises in humans. More broadly, our results show that precopulatory sexual selection can play a role in the evolution of genital traits.

It took a team of four scientists to do the research. Amazingly, it was not the team of Wang, Peters, Johnson, and John Thomas, but the team of Wong, Peters, Mautz, and Jennions. Translating the above abstract of their research from Scientese to English, with the aid of an analytical third-party peer review article that goes to reasonable, but not painful, length to understand the thrust of their reasoning ... and we get the earth shattering news that Chicks Big On Dicks, and the 24/7 news cycle is once again satisfied. But never satiated.

Science proves women like men with bigger penises

The human male possesses the Italian designer faucet of penises. They’re pretty big, the biggest of any primate’s relative to body size. And they’re showy, too, right out there, front and center on our upright bodies (i.e., they don’t retract), as if they were meant to be seen as part of the décor. Why?

A study released today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers an explanation: Women are attracted to penises, and the bigger the better.

“Penis size does affect attractiveness,” lead author Brian Mautz, a University of Ottawa post-doctoral researcher said in an NBCNews.com interview.

Past research has seemed to indicate that women, as a group, are drawn to larger male members. But those results have been disputed as sexist, or scientifically flawed, or both.

So Mautz and his team, working at the Australian National University, designed an experiment in hopes of settling the controversy. They created 49 unique, computer-generated, nude, life-sized male figures. Each figure varied in three traits: height, shoulder-hip ratio and flaccid penis size.

The researchers then displayed all the figures to 105 Australian women with an average age of 26. The women, who were not told which traits varied, were asked to rate the attractiveness of the figures as sexual partners on a scale of 1-7. The women were alone in the room and their responses were anonymous.

As past studies have shown, women prefer tall men with broad shoulders and narrow hips, like an Olympic swimmer. But when Mautz controlled for those variables, it turned out that penis size (overall length and girth) was about as important as stature.

“As you increase penis size, the amount of attractiveness scores gets bigger” in a linear fashion, he explained, until 7.6 centimeters, or 3 inches. After three inches, attractiveness still increased, but in smaller increments.

Not only were the ratings higher, but the women also spent more time gazing at the generously endowed figures, a sign they preferred looking at them as opposed to figures with smaller penises.

Women with a greater body mass index held stronger preferences for big penises. And size was most critical in tall men, perhaps, Mautz speculated, because “a taller guy must have a disproportionately larger penis to sort of make it clear” he’s endowed.

So there you have it. You would assume that such a study would also point out the statistically most popular male height given that they already knew the most popular male body shape. A little cock-up perhaps, or else the researchers just wanted to stay true to the thesis in hand.

Or as Mautz puts it in his paper, “Our results support the hypothesis that female mate choice could have driven the evolution of larger penises in humans.”

Of course, this is the 21st century. Most men wear pants – or at the very least, kilts. Mautz was quick to soothe men by saying that his study did not include other proven mate choice factors like money, intelligence, hair or whether a guy drives a 1997 Chevy Astro.

Hey, how about a 1997 Saturn?

Posted by Drew458     on 04/12/2013 at 08:47 AM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and Discoveries • Humor • News-Briefs • No Shit, Sherlock • Sex •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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