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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

No mention of the one size every man is interested in most.

It would be interesting if there's a correlation with other things made of cartilage like the nose and ears.

It's interesting to note that we humans evolved vastly bigger penises than the other monkeys (silverback gorillas are much larger than men but sport 1.25-inchers) due to women having much more choice / social capital than female gorillas.

I'm not sure if female social capital in gorillas is the reason for the shorter penis size. Because in other primates, like bonobos, for example, where females predominate and have lots of choice, penis size is still small.

I think the main reason why is because sex is used in humans for pair-bonding, and many human cultures have much more monogamous lifestyles—raising children together for example. Sex in humans is less for procreation than in monkeys, so larger penis sizes became more adaptive.

I thought it was because apes fight by grabbing and tearing, so with that evolutionary pressure applied you basically end up with the minimum effective protrusion.

Also, this is why I plan to avoid fighting apes or at least try to wear some good pants if I do.

You may be right. If there was a selective pressure against large penises due to intra-male fighting, and the lack of a strong enough pressure for larger penises (due to the relative absence of pair-bonding), that would support the observation that gorilla penises are small. For humans, where that sort of fighting doesn't happen, and where pair-bonding is important, penis size would naturally drift upwards until they become too big, or they take too much energy to grow/utilize.

One way to test this would be analyze the fighting techniques of various primate species, and then bin them based on their penis size and relative monogamy. If all primates that grab and tear have small penis, irrespective of their pair-bonding, then perhaps the former is more important.

That measurement does not appear to be in the dataset. I guess the military doesn't measure it because it doesn't matter to them.

My first thought was, "Yep, the impetus for this was 100% about someone trying to see something about penis sizes."

I've read height is weakly correlated (which intuitively makes sense, as greater height is more or less synonymous with larger body size).

Also the second-to-fourth digit ratio seems correlated. Longer ring finger seems to indicate more testosterone in utero.

The (many) other claims appear to be bunk.

Giggity

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