Penis Theory

Huh. How about that?

Reading a really interesting book right now. Y: The Descent of Men, by Steve Jones. It's won awards for science writing. It's a discussion of the male of the human species. That's where I got the thing about the penis.

To recap, you are the way you are because of the splicing together of half of your mother's genetic complement with half of your father's genetic complement. Nothing about you (eye color, hair color, whatever) is exactly like your father or mother, because the other parent's genes are somewhere in the mix.

Except where the penis is concerned. Y'see, the penis is coded by the Y chromosome. And you got that from your father. Your mother didn't have one to give. Ergo, your penis is essentially a clone of your father's penis. So you have your father's penis.

Now, think about that. That means that your father also has his father's penis. And his father has his father's penis.

Gosh.

So I've got the penis of some primordial ancester. Clubbing a boar to death for dinner in the ancient woodlands of Prussia, or climbing out of a some bog on the Russian steppes... I've got that guy's penis!

Although, wouldn't that mean that there are only so many penises (penii?) in the world? I mean even in the case of same sex reproduction (we're not there yet as a species, but numerous invertebrates are), there is some variation in genotype due to corruption that occurs during cell division. But not a lot.

So I think it would be likely that if you encounter a penis that is not very dissimilar to your own, the bearer could very well be a long lost relative.

I know that science has been able to do a lot of work looking at mitochondria. Y'see, you get all your mitochondria from your mom. It's always the female of the species that passes on mitochondria--found in each and every one of your cells--to all offspring, regardless of sex. And much progress has been made in reverse engineering human evolution by tracking back mitochondria lines. Perhaps the same could be done with the penis. Races are a fiction, scientifically speaking. But it would be possible to divide humanity (the menfolk anyway) into human families by size and type of penis. I guess if you were to set out on that endeavor, you'd have to account for over-reporting in terms of size, though.

Speaking of size, I now have massive, throbbing broadband internet connection. And that feels really good.

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