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Figure 1A
Sam Shuster
Emeritus Professor,
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K.
Whether you enjoy classical sculpture or just pass it by when visiting stately homes and gardens, you must have noticed that there are many broken-off pieces. You may have further noticed that, if you exclude the commonplace loss of limbs and fingers, the penis fronts the list of lost sculptural properties (see example in Figure 1A and close-up in Figure1B). We all know the penile organ often goes astray socially, but why does its stone version go missing?
As a clinical researcher, I’ve spent a life wondering, a habit too strong to be undone by retirement; and this particular item of sculptural pathology has long idled listlessly on my list of wonderments. Then last year, during a touristic gawp at classical Rome, the enormity of the city’s sculpture population and that population’s inescapable depenilation gave me no option (I felt) but to study the problem. This is the curious story of how that happened.
Penises In, or Not In, The Vatican
My first, simplistic explanation of the missing penises was their deliberate removal, presumably because of distaste for the public showing of a private organ. That would explain the great frequency of their loss from both classical and later pieces on display in public places throughout Europe, where their removal could be executed in silence.
But what about Vatican City? There, surely, sculptures are less likely to be struck by vandalism in the gardens, or for concealment of sexual embarrassment in the great Vatican halls. After all, they were commissioned for their naked appearance, and the many paintings close by are just as revealing. Of course the oldest sculptures would have been exposed before reaching the safety of the Vatican, but the more contemporary pieces were always in safe hands. So my first experimental question about sculptural penis loss (SPL) was whether it was less in Vatican City than elsewhere.
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Henry Head, in a photograph taken in 1914 or in some other year, the documentation being unclear.
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Nowadays not many people read Brain on Head in Brain. That could change, because this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Brain’s mostly-admiring six-page essay called “Henry Head: A Man and His Ideas,” which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Dr. Head’s birth. Which means that this year we are all of us entitled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that happy event.
Dr. Brain—who was also Lord Brain, Baron Brain of Eynsham—was editor of the journal Brain.
It would have been surprising had he not written that essay about Dr. Head. That’s because Head preceded Brain (the man) as head (which is to say, editor) of the journal (the name of which, I repeat for clarity, is Brain).
Head headed Brain from 1905 to 1923. Brain became head in 1954, dying in office in 1967. No other editors in the journal’s long history (it was founded in 1879) could or did boast surnames that so stunningly announced their obsession, profession, and place of employ. One of Dr. Brain’s final articles, in 1963, is called “Some Reflections on Brain and Mind.”
“Some Reflections on Brain and Mind,” Lord Brain, Brain, vol. 86, no. 3, 1963, pp. 381-402.
Dr. Head wrote many monographs, some quite lengthy, for Brain. The first, a 135-page behemoth, appeared in 1893, long before he became editor. In it, Dr. Head gives special thanks to a Dr. Buzzard, citing Dr. Buzzard’s generosity, the nature of which is not specified.
Dr. Russell Brain
Reading Dr. Brain’s Brain tribute and other material about Dr. Head, one gets the strong impression that Head had a big head, and that it was stuffed full of knowledge, which Dr. Head was not shy about sharing. Brain writes that “Some men… feel impelled to impart information to others. Head was one of those.”
Brain then quotes Professor H.M. Turnbull as saying:
I had the good fortune when first going to the hospital to meet daily in the mornings, on the steam engine underground railway, Dr. Henry Head. He… kindly taught me throughout our journeys about physical signs, much to the annoyance of our fellow travellers; indeed in his characteristic keenness he spoke so loudly that as we walked to the hospital from St. Mary’s station people on the other side of the wide Whitechapel Road would turn to look at us.
Brain says that Head “would illustrate his lectures by himself reproducing the involuntary movements or postures produced by nervous disease, and ‘Henry Head doing gaits’ was a perennial attraction.”
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Gents,
feel free to skip this story about a Chinese man who got a bit more than
he bargained for at this unusual Chinese spa:
Thinking that the eels would make him look ten years younger, Nan dived into the water and let them feast upon layers of dead skin.
But after laying in the spa bath, Nan felt a sharp pain and realised a small eel was working its way up his urethra and into his bladder.
'I climbed into the bath and I could feel the eels nibbling my body. But then suddenly I felt a severe pain and realised a small eel had gone into the end of my penis,' the 56-year-old from Honghu, Hubei province said.
'I tried to hold it and take it out, but the eel was too slippery to be held and it disappeared up my penis.'
You may have noticed that the human penis lacks spines protruding from the surface. This is in contrast to many animals, including other primates such as chimpanzees, which use the spines for sexual competition:
It has long been believed that humans evolved smooth penises as a result of adopting a more monogamous reproductive strategy than their early human ancestors. Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females.
Researchers, while studying another topic, stumbled upon one explanation by comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes:
They first systematically identified 510 DNA sequences missing in humans and present in chimps, finding that those sequences were almost exclusively from the non-coding regions of the genome, between genes. They then homed in on two sequences whose absence in humans they thought might be interesting — one from near the androgen receptor (AR) gene and one from near a gene involved in tumour suppression (GADD45G).
Inserting the chimpanzee sequences into mouse embryos revealed that the former sequence produced both the hard penile spines and sensory whiskers present in some animals. The latter sequence acted as a kind of brake on the growth of specific brain regions — with the removal of its function appearing to have paved the way for the evolution of the larger human brain.
Link | Photo by Flickr user lightmatter used under Creative Commons license
Male flies have penises covered with spines and hooks. To figure out what the purpose of those spines are, researchers Michal Polak and Arash Rashed removed the spines to see what would happen.
Their spines are too small to cut off by hand. So the duo used a laser instead, wielding the light with such surgical precision that they could cut off a third of each millimetre-long spine, or the entire structure.
They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females.
The conclusion is that the fly’s penis hairs act as Velcro, to grasp the female long enough to inject sperm. Now you know. Link -via Treehugger
Previously at Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits.
Photo manipulated at Speechable.
Scientists from Wake Forest University in North Carolina aroused the world’s interest by successfully performing the world’s first replacement of erectile tissue of the penis. And yes, it’s somewhat fitting that they chose the rabbit to perform the Frankenweenie experiment:
In a previous study, the researchers engineered short segments of rabbit erectile tissue with 50% of full function.
In the latest work, they harvested smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells from the animals’ erectile tissue.
These cells were multiplied in the laboratory and used to seed a three dimensional scaffold, which was implanted into the animals’ penis.
Organised erectile tissue with blood vessel structures began to form as early as a month later.
The researchers believe the key was the fact that the cells were injected into the scaffolds on two separate days, enabling them to hold almost six times as many smooth muscle cells as in previous studies.
A 400 million-year-old fossil fish with a reproductive organ resembling a penis has been identified by Australian scientists. This is the earliest known structure used for sexual reproduction as we know it. The bone attached to the pelvis is called a clasper, and was used to penetrate a female during mating. The fish was a member of the extinct class of armored fish called placoderms.
Study author and palaeontologist Dr Kate Trinajstic, of Curtin University in Perth, says the clasper was discovered in a fish specimen uncovered in the Gogo region of Western Australia in 2001.
She says the team originally discounted the bone as the reproductive organ because they thought it was part of the pelvic gurdle.
On closer inspection, Trinajstic says they realised it was a sexual organ.
“We were surprised because it’s so big,” she says. “We were expecting something smaller.”
(image credit: John Long)
