For Darwin propagandist Richard Dawkins, genes are the evolutionary drivers, as he writes in “The Selfish Gene” (1996). Among its examples is the penis bone (baculum). Almost all male mammals have it and some female mammals have a clitoris bone (baubellum). It is only missing in humans and tarsiers.
Dawkins assumes that we lost it in the course of evolution because “men without a penis bone enabled women to check the health of the man willing to mate. Erectile dysfunction is often a result of various physical or psychological diseases and factors (e.g. stress). Since an erection caused by a penis bone does not allow such an assessment, the women may have preferred to mate with men whose health they could better assess. This was the necessary selection pressure to reduce the penis bone,” writes de-academic.com. It was also not regressed during embryonic development like the tail, which is also missing in humans. He’s just missing.
Dawkins is not only a fierce Darwinist, but also a strident atheist. In 2008, he had buses in London covered with posters against the “God delusion”. In the American Journal of Medical Genetics (Volume 101/2001), the biology historian Scott Gilbert and the religious researcher Ziony Zevit achieved the feat of reconciling Darwin and the Bible in their essay “Congenital human baculum deficiency: The generative bone of Genesis 2:21-23”. According to Wikipedia, they demonstrated that “the rib of Adam, from which God created Eve in the story of creation, actually means the penis bone. The rib would therefore be a mistranslation of a Hebrew euphemism for penis bone. Following this view, this would explain the lack of a penis bone in men as well as the existence of the raphe penis (the vertical perineal seam on the penis) as the supposed ‘scar’ of this operation,” i.e. this divine one intervention to alleviate Adam’s loneliness in paradise.
Origin from rib
The feminists, who have already taken a dim view of the creation of their foremother Eva from Adam’s rib, are different: They succinctly dismiss as “bullshit” this stupid theory from two US eggheads that Eva was in fact not created from Adam’s rib, but from his penis bone. For example, the documentarian Katrin Eissing argues that most wild mammals mate at most once or twice a year, which usually happens very quickly.
The penis bone provides valuable services to males. There is no need for much fiddling around on either side of the mating act. Instead of foreplay and stimulation, the females often then mate with other males. With humans, on the other hand, it seems that men always want to fuck and theoretically can, but without a penis bone they have to be sensitive, otherwise the erection won’t work.
The atheist but Dawkins-critical Chemnitz Latin lecturer Burkhard Müller sees it similarly. He writes in his “Objection to the Theory of Evolution: The Happiness of Animals” (2009): The penis bone is “a highly practical device because it makes the capricious hydraulics of the erection superfluous for sexual intercourse.” He “simplifies copulation enormously and eliminates any embarrassing failure from the outset and with the reliability of the automaton. However, humans, the closest relative of the chimpanzee (which has a penis bone, albeit a very small one, just under two centimeters long), do not even have a rudimentary version of such a ‘baculum’. How could this happen? How was evolution able to remove such an infallibly successful number from the program?”
Like she did with people’s cocks, for example. Of course, molecular biologists have an explanation for this, the same as for almost all developmental phenomena: humans and their closest relatives lost their tails in the course of evolution. On br.de it says in 2024: “US researchers (now again!) have discovered that a special gene caused the tail to disappear through mutation.”
The author Prisca Straub quotes the head of the research team: “It is super surprising that such a big change – namely the loss of our history – could be caused by such a small genetic change.” Scientists have proven the “mechanism” of taillessness in mice. “A so-called ‘jumping gene’ could have migrated to another place in the genome many millions of years ago.”
tail in trees
However, US researchers are flexible. They explain taillessness not only in the orthodox way with Darwin, but also with his opponent Lamarck: “A tail can be an advantage if you live in trees. However, once you walk on land, walking on two legs without a tail may have had an evolutionary advantage.” And if people do have to take refuge in trees from time to time, they still have an “opposable thumb” that improves their gripping function despite the lack of a tail. All Old World monkeys also have such a thumb, even the tree-dwelling chimpanzees and orangutans, while gorillas largely live on the ground. Wikipedia speaks of an “evolutionary leap in development between these primates compared to the American New World monkeys,” which do not have an opposable thumb but do have prehensile tails.
Back to Burkhard Müller’s criticism of Dawkins, who sees the penis-boneless erection in the context of sexual selection as “luxuries”, similar to the tail feathers of the peacock and the antlers of the deer, which in their lavish splendor are supposed to testify to the animal’s abundant health. “‘It’s as if the males were forced by the females to develop thermometers that constantly stick out of their mouths and are easily readable by the females,’ says Dawkins. In human males, he suspects, the erect penis may now serve the same purpose.”
Today they can still deceive women with Viagra, but tomorrow men will disappear completely because the Y chromosome is slowly dying out, as the human geneticist Bryan Sykes showed in “No Future for Adam” (2003).