Oh please, to act like there's not an element of female choice in the biology of human mating is just ridiculous. Why do you think [some] men try so hard to impress women?? Why do you think [some] women are attracted to male secondary sexual characteristics? As an evolutionary biologist, I thought the first letter writer was a little off base but this comment is just so ignorant I am rolling my eyes.

@1 Yes, and also: clothing entered the picture relatively late. For most our evolutionary history, women would have seen plenty of penises before making whatever choices were theirs to make.

But regardless of what degree women may or may not have had in selecting bedmates, to what extent have they historically actually seen their partner's penis before they were bound in marriage? If they didn't see it, how could it have been a factor?

I will freely admit that I'm thinking about the last ~2,000 years, and Eurocentrically to boot, which evolutionarily may be insignificant, and things may have been quite different during prehistorical human evolution. Throwing it out there as food for thought.

@3 For the most part, 2,000 years is evolutionarily insignificant

@2 - Hypothesis addressed! ;-)

Over a period of 4-6 million years, early apes developed into more human-like apes, which gave rise to Australopithecus afarensis, which lived from 3.9 million to 2.9 million years ago. Then came Homo habilis, which lived between roughly 2.1 and 1.5 million years ago. Following that was Homo erectus, which dates to 1.9 million years ago and extends to 143,000 years ago. The oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern humans date to 195,000 years ago. Behavioral modernity is evident from around 40,000–50,000 years ago.

So even if there was an abrupt change in sexual behaviors starting as far back at 50,000 years ago, that would still be only 1 percent of human evolution, and would be even less if you decided to look back even further in our evolutionary timeline.

None of that proves that anywhere along that timeline early human or hominid females were choosing mates based on penis size, but we underwent a substantial process of evolution and certain choices were being made, and any lack of agency among modern women, isn't really relevant when you're looking back over a period of millions of years.

Being Canadian, I measure in centimeters which sounds more impressive. Few women bother to divide by 2.54.

Given that 9 out of 10 beavers prefer Canadian wood, perhaps describing via the metric system can give the illusion of size women claim to want.

Tim @ 7 - Being the receptive partner in penetrative sex (sometimes), I can assure you that once you get down to it, it's not the numbers that count, it's how it feels inside.

And as far as I am concerned, length is definitely not an asset; girth is. But obviously, my preferences won't influence evolution much.

@1,2,3,6 +1. The original comments, most commenters didn't get evolution and minimized female hominid agency (and pre-agricultural human female agency).

@8 science says yes, your preferences may influence evolution! Women who have gay sons may have many MORE offspring, and the gay uncle hypothesis means your nephews and nieces may be more likely to survive. And more likely to share whatever genes influence dick preferences. :)

To the "past life" LW - maybe the kid had a bandage / medical fetish IN HIS PAST LIFE. Did you think of that, huh?

omfg

Quick fact for anyone who believes in reincarnation: there are more people alive today than ever existed in the entire history of hominid evolution, ADDED UP -- reincarnation was only plausible (if you can call it that) when human populations were (or appeared for recorded memory) static in size. We are now in an exponential growth. If we needed a "past soul" there wouldn't be enough to go around anymore.

@1 ehhhh...

I mean, part of it is, the primacy of romantic love - of marriage and child rearing as an act of love - is a modern idea.

Additionally - our historical record is almost entirely of the most elite men of their times - men who, in the same position today, could pick their wife (or wives) just as easily.

Furthermore, most of the biological differences between men and women were established in our pre-human ancestors, who... uh... I mean we know absolutely zero about their social organization and mate selection process. Also, we don't observe penis size as a selective variable in any other primate species...

Here's a better evolutionary question: Why do so many people have fucked up vision that they require glasses? You would think THAT would be an evolutionary problem when it comes to surviving in a difficult world. Is that a poisonous plant, or a tasty edible? Etc.

@ 9 - Theoretically, yes, but my sisters' preferences in dick size aren't necessarily the same as mine (as far as I know), so whose would win out? At any rate, I'm pretty sure it's not so much a question of genes, but rather one of equipment (i.e. anal sphincter and prostate position vs. vagina). And since none of my nephews are gay (not even bi!), there won't be much demand in my family for men whose dick rubs the prostate just right while providing this "filled up" sensation.

@ 11 - "If we needed a "past soul" there wouldn't be enough to go around anymore."

And that's not even counting all those souls that have reached nirvana (or whatever) and no longer need to be doing penance on Earth.

Or modern science, which has pretty much established that all we feel, think and do is the direct product of our brain processes, and not that of some special "essence".

Sportlandia @ 12 - "Why do so many people have fucked up vision that they require glasses? "

Most vision problems occur later in life. Considering that 100 years ago, life expectancy was 40, the great majority of people before that time didn't reach the age when vision problems started occurring, so it played no role whatsoever in their mating ability and/or desirability. The genes for bad eyes were therefore spread unnoticed until we started living longer.

Nah, most people who wear glasses/contacts to see long-distance first get diagnosed by their teens at the latest. (It's needing glasses to read that hits in your 40s.) The propensity to need glasses *is* genetic (as is 20/20 vision), however, it's a lot like genetic propensity to cancer: whether it's kicked into gear is influenced by your environment.

The need for glasses/contacts has been exploding over the past 30-40 years as more people grow up staring too much at screens (or even books): extensive time doing looking at things so close to your face as a kid alters the development of your eyeballs, making them less and less good focusing at distance – and then you're diagnosed as needing glasses around age 8-16.

In humanity's past, when evolution was happing, we didn't live like this, so the near-sightedness gene was much more rarely kicked into gear. It just sat there, passed on generation to generation, like our unused appendix..... Until this modern era.

@15 thank you! Those earlier comments about vision were pretty confused....

I have done over 10,000 pelvic exams/Pap smears on my patients. As a family doc I see both men and women. I’ve heard every story and held their hands when they cried. They trust me.

I specifically ask women--“Do you like men with large penises?” Patients? The answer is NO! RNs? NO! Women colleagues-NO!
If a man has confidence in being a human being he can have a one inch cock--fully erect--and still pleasure a woman and have children via normal intercourse.

So where is all this coming from?

BTW I have seen my fair share of Hoover injuries, one resulting in gangrene and needing to amputate.

Oh and the letter about “previous lives?” Really? And this paper has the AUDACITY to put down white evangelicals?

You ask your patients that, Helen? That's risky. And no, a one inch penis would not be satisfactory. I'm starting to doubt you are a woman or even a real doctor.
An imposter is amongst us!

Lava @18: I agree. "Dr" Helen is clearly a man with a one-inch cock. These guys can, indeed, pleasure a woman. They have tongues and fingers, after all.

Previous lives are no more ridiculous a concept than all this arguing about evolution. Every man has one penis. It's his to learn to use. Nothing that science can discover will change the shape or size of your penis. What your ancestors from 10,000 years ago preferred has absolutely zero bearing on what your penis looks like, so can we all just give it a rest already!?

Oh for goodness sake. Of course size matters. Although as Ricardo says, it's more about girth than length. And if you haven't experienced just the right cock pressing against your g spot in just the right way, then you simply don't know yet.

Congrats to DTMFA, better late than never!

Big sigh as I once again go into the basics of evolution. It's not that a non-adaptive trait gets thrown out once in a great while and is quickly quashed by the forces of natural selection. This idea of a steady march towards adaptive perfection gives rise to puzzles about bad eyesight and homosexuality and mental retardation. No. Non-adaptive traits get thrown into every generation and like crazy. Natural selection works on them relentlessly. There are constant instances of non-adaptive bad eyesight and eggs that don't meet sperm and men that have many attractive qualities coupled with an equal number of non-attractive qualities same as women. There MAY be a reproductive advantage to having a gay brother, but there isn't necessarily. There doesn't have to be. It could be that being gay is an evolutionary dead end. Note the knots I have to tie myself into to avoid words like good and bad in this since adaptive traits and non-adaptive traits are morality free. These traits just ARE.

I'm sort of glad I don't have a penis, it must be a worry. The length, the girth, will it still become erect without help. Having periods and bleeding monthly sure was a slog. I've never doubted though my pussy wasn't up to standard for sex.
A lot of women aren't so happy,getting cut into, because of how their genitals look. That's what pubic hair is for, so it's presented as a hidden treasure.

*I meant to say having babies and bleeding monthly.
Then again, having all that flesh between one's legs must be funny. And getting an erection, that must be a buzz.

Most of the time when participating in this comments section I'm happy to read others' opinions, give my own view, and feel no need to convince anyone of anything or to repeat myself. Throw that all out the window when we get on the subject of evolution. On that subject, I want to set the record straight. Here's what I wrote a few days ago on the big dicks column.

The reproductive advantage in a trait comes first. The desire for the trait that has the reproductive advantage comes second. Thus: There's a reproductive advantage to being a healthy adult male that can care for offspring. That's first. Adult females desiring sex with healthy adult males who will care for offspring comes next. Finding sex with those healthy adult males as pleasurable is 3rd or tied up with the 2nd.

This can't be stated too strongly. You don't have females arbitrarily deciding they like something and then having that something become adaptive because of the desire. No.

Penis size. Women didn't up and decide they liked penises, big or otherwise, because they feel good. They feel good because there's an adaptive advantage to penis in vagina sex.

Explaining this further: Female preference in penis size is a worthy subject just like female preference in hair style, whether we like men in jeans or business suits, or whether we prefer classic rock to cool jazz is a worthy subject. (Classic rock for me.) But none of that has anything to do with evolution. I'm glad to talk about my tastes in oral sex, and it's vaguely interesting to think that my pre-historic ancestors might have had tastes in such things themselves, but let's not pretend that was important in an evolutionary sense. Same goes for whether or not pre-historic women were sizing up penises when choosing mates. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. But what matters is adaptation first, preference second.

@25/Fichu: I'm not sure I follow your argument, since I don't think anyone disagrees with the premise that a reproductive advantage in a trait comes first, and then the desire for the trait that comes second. But that does not rule out that there wasn't an evolutionary advantage vis-a-vis penis size. Moreover, many placental mammals, including other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee have a baculum or os penis (a bone found in the penis), which aids sexual reproduction by maintaining sufficient stiffness during sexual penetration. That bone is absent in the human penis, so undoubtedly evolution played a role in altering the human penis. Given that humans reproduce sexually, that sex in human evolved to be a pleasurable act, that sex in humans needed to be pleasurable enough to ensure successful copulation without an os penis, it's not implausible that penis size bore on the evolutionary outcome. All the more so given than human penises are larger for human body size than other primates.

Again, none of that is definitive proof of how evolution played out over the past 10 million years, but I don't see how we rule out that factor entirely.

A cock will feel different in different positions, how does that fit into evolutionary theory.
I never measured any men who have come my way, that seemed impertinent. And none every volunteered. It was another era. I don't ever recall being with a man whose erection visually, didn't seem fine by me. How it felt was always the test.

YFNO @ 15 - "most people who wear glasses/contacts to see long-distance first get diagnosed by their teens at the latest"

Nowadays. Was it always like this? We don't know. (See your second paragraph - there might have been other factors over the years to trigger those genes earlier and earlier).

Also, I'm pretty certain that for a long, long part of evolution, good long-distance vision wasn't as crucial for survival (and, therefore, for someone's ability to reproduce and spread their genes) as good short-distance vision. If only one member of the group had good long-distance vision, all members of the group benefitted from it (since that member could warn the others of dangers still afar). If someone couldn't really see what they put in their mouth, though, their chances of survival were rather drastically hampered.

So I'll amend my original phrasing thus: "Most vision problems that could have an influence on one's chances of survival occur later in life."

@27/LavaGirl: Apes are not bipedal and neither were early hominids, so copulating positions and the size, shape, and positioning of genitals for both sexes would have changed as early humans evolved to upright walking. What worked functionally and felt good for an early female hominid 4 million years ago, whose genitals were rear facing, would be different for her upright walking descendants 2 million years later, whose genitals were now more downward facing as their hips rotated to permit bipedal locomotion.

'...until extremely recently in humanity's history, women more often than not did not get to choose the man they married & made kids with.'

Oh puhleeze! About 1% of 'humanity's history' is history. Patriarchal societies, with human chattel don't seem to have existed before agriculture. So dismissing the idea of female interest-desire is a classic Texas Bullseye.

If it was 1960, I could sell an evo-psych rationalization of how, due to the rise of fishery in the Neolithic, women are programmed in their DNA to desire men who's cars have the biggest tailfins.

Interesting points happening here. Fascinating response SA @30, just not sure how it links up with cock size. I found the taller the man the bigger the cock. A lazy woman's guide to partner choice.

The letter about penis size is off-base, I think. Generally speaking, anthropologists who study human evolution look at hunter-gatherer societies to gain insight into early human behavior. And those societies don't tend to be as monogamous. And mating behavior among our pre-Homo sapiens ancestors may have been even less so. It certainly wasn't dictated by the sexual mores of Moses or Mohammad, at any rate. And of course, many supposedly monogamous couples and cultures aren't, not 100% anyway.

Evolution can exert pressure even if many women don't get the opportunity to choose their partner, or don't choose on the basis of penis size. What matters is whether having a bigger penis increases your likelihood of fathering children, not whether it determines it completely. If on average large-dicked men father 2% more children, that would still matter.

But it is true that things like arranged marriage would reduce the influence of penis size (since I doubt that it is considered when making matches). I don't think those sorts of practices existed for most of human evolution, however.

26- Sublime-- I haven't gone back to see where I got the idea that people were saying that women's choices based on pleasure were driving evolutionary force. You may be right. My electricity has only just come back on after the recent storms so I'm not up to the research, but thanks for your response.

@11 delta

Just FYI... As an atheist who grew up in a (half) Hindu family, I can assure you that you don't know what you are talking about here. Not that I believe in reincarnation or rebirth, but you are completely misunderstanding the beliefs of those who do. Both Hindus and Buddhists believe you can be reborn in a variety of realms that basically fit into the following categories: as various demons in hell realms, as various gods in heaven realms, as various ghosts, as various animals on earth or as humans on earth. Moreover, this is just for THIS cycle of existence- in the past there were other realms and other beings. And finally, not everyone who believes in rebirth believes in a soul in the first place, as Buddhists believe it is the karma that is reborn (as they split from Hindus by rejecting the concept of an individual soul). Therefore, the number of humans that have ever lived is completely irrelevant to either reincarnation or rebirth for a multitude of reasons.

@31 cont. on reflection I realise the ' love of my life' was not tall, was balding and rounded and his cock wasn't that big. I would have married him, if he'd asked me too. So where does love fit in with evolutionary notions.