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External testicles are interesting because they do seem like pretty terrible "design" by evolution. However, as any man can tell you, the pain associated with g
by tribune 8y ago
External testicles are interesting because they do seem like pretty terrible "design" by evolution. However, as any man can tell you, the pain associated with getting hit in these all-important reproductive organs is so severe that he will go to great lengths to avoid it and protect them. This makes sense evolutionarily: men protect their fragile but crucial external organs. It's a lesson they only have to learn once!
Also interestingly, it seems that sperm really needs to be cool to operate well. Some of the first advice fertility doctors will give to a man is to wear loose underwear, i.e. let the testicles hang and stay cooler than the rest of your body. Apparently none of our ancestors had success making sperm at body temperature, so we're stuck with these external organs that are optimized to stay cool at the price of being vulnerable.
- gxs 8y agoDefinitely appreciate that you put design in quotes - we aren't really designed in the way that most people think about the word. My understanding is more like things are tried until something sticks. Maybe internal testicles would have been optimal, but external ones were first and simply good enough to stick around.
- mbreese 8y agoIt’s also possible that there was a different adaptation that happened at the same time that was more important and that external testicles weren’t necessarily good enough to stick around, but rather not bad enough to ditch!
- hprotagonist 8y agoto make a bad CS analogy, imagine 4.5 billion years of grad student code. Each generation does juuust enough work to graduate, makes liberal use of chicken wire and duct tape, JB weld if you're lucky. Source control is for suckers. Mutation is a great design pattern. Globals are obviously the best. Goto is fine. Dependency management is for lesser beings. The code was hard to write, so it should be hard to read. There are no comments and if there were they would lie.
- jobigoud 8y agoAnd meta programming. Lots of meta programming.
- noxToken 8y ago> the pain associated with getting hit in these all-important reproductive organs is so severe that he will go to great lengths to avoid it and protect them Too bad we're so soft-headed that we spend our formative years doing our best to hit each other in the testicles as much as possible!
- rarec 8y agoIt's also possible, in a roundabout way, that external testicles are more for display rather than practicality. Sexual selection has a fairly heavy weight on evolution, even if such a trait has some pretty big downsides (male peacocks being a prime example of this).
- beaconstudios 8y agoThat would make total sense if the human mating ritual involved the male impressing the female with the size of his testicles.
- gowld 8y agoHow do you know it didn't? Culture changes faster than evolution. http://mentalfloss.com/article/79897/why-arent-classical-statues-very-well-endowed http://mentalfloss.com/article/79897/why-arent-classical-sta... “Ancient Greece was a highly masculinist culture,” she explained. “They favored ‘small and taut’ genitals, as opposed to big sex organs, to show male self-control in matters of sexuality."
- beaconstudios 8y agoexactly, most of culture changes fast and for there to be a sexually selective pressure on testicles for a long enough time to make a difference, it would surely persist into recorded history. Either human mating practices are cultural and transitive so they would not exert continuous evolutionary pressure, or they are somehow more ingrained and thus could exist long enough to trigger noticeable evolutionary changes.
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