Even making it slightly more difficult or less effective should have been enough. Penises got optimised! That's why they have a plunger on the end! XD
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Replying to @HPluckrose
The plunger on the end is to extract competitors' sperm. That makes survival of your genes a lot more likely. Having to mess around with foreskin? Not an issue preventing fertilization.
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Replying to @KanStaandPijpen
Exactly. Well, if it doesn't make sex even a little bit more difficult or tiny bit less successful, it can stay.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
It makes sex more difficult for some men, and less successful for a good number more. I think a better question would be what reasons we find valid to circumcise.
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Replying to @KanStaandPijpen
But then these men would have fewer offspring and foreskins would recede surely? Why would there be skin which made procreation harder?
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Replying to @HPluckrose
Because evolution is a lot more messy than that. Foreskin comes from the much older sheath of quadrupeds, and evolution doesn't make big jumps. So if intermediate steps toward no-4skin don't improve matters, the chasm is never bridged.
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Replying to @KanStaandPijpen
And wouldn't it? Improve matters? If foreskin is a problem for some and not for others, there's clearly variation which should be subject to natural selection, no?
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Replying to @HPluckrose
Via which gradual path should foreskin disappear? If I'm not mistaken, it's formed together with vital parts of the penis in embryo. Beneficial variations in foreskin would therefore be highly likely to cause detrimental changes in the other parts.
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Replying to @KanStaandPijpen
The same as with other vestigial parts. I've just been reading and apparently, rather than shrinking, evolution made it grow. Considered beneficial for reproduction: http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=15 …
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Replying to @HPluckrose @KanStaandPijpen
the human prepuce is not "vestigial" but is, in fact, an evolutionary advancement over the prepuce of other primates. This is most clearly seen in the evolutionary increase in corpuscular innervation of the human prepuce...
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...and the concomitant decrease in corpuscular receptors of the human glans relative to the innervation of the prepuce and glans of lower primates." http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-mcgrath/ …
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