A Funny "Evolution" Story About Balls

[Tonya Crusch]

I'm pretty sure that this post I found is a joke, but I enjoyed it anyway.  The full text can be found here:  http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2011/01/25/are-dangly-things-...

Here's the key portion of it...

In this story, our heroes, the testicles, live comfortably and happily in recessed body cavity, never descending into the cold, cold air. “Primitive Dude” is happy and his sperm love their cozy, extra-warm spots and thrive happily on higher temps than at present. Some few men have testicles that stick out a little bit, and while women secretly think those things look weird, they do not discriminate, kindly tolerating the odd bits.

However, early humans discover something – sexual dimorphism permits males to go around making females have sex with them. This is bad, as Greg Laden points out, because males are less likely to invest resources in children they don’t think are theirs, and thus the children are less likely to live. This is bad from a non-evolutionary standpoint as well, since females probably didn’t like it much better then than they do now.

Then one heroic pre-historic woman realized something. Those testicles that stick out are excellent for kicking hard when some asshole comes to rape you. Males kicked thus tend to moan and be immobilized, while clutching themselves. “Primitive woman” who was not stupid, came to strongly prefer to mate with males who dangly bits meant that a potential rape victim had at least one avenue of recourse. It didn’t always work, of course, and you were still stuck with those silly-looking dangly bits, but at least they gave you a shot at getting away and not being raped, and this was good, because not only were your offspring more likely to survive but you didn’t waste time you could be spending hunting and gathering on flashbacks and anger. The males with recessed testicles eventually were selected against (since rape was the only way they got any), and since the most fertile dangly males had more offspring, we evolved so that spermies like it cooler. And that, my dear grasshoppers, is how the house-ape came to have hairy balls – as a rape prevention method.