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US man who claims to have world’s smallest penis launches fundraiser for enlargement surgery (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 months ago* by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 8 points 3 months ago (11 children)

Evolution works by minimizing this kind of abnormality, but it never disappears. There’s just too much variance in how our DNA works. That’s a good thing, though, because the environment is not static. Without any variance, we would have died out a long long time ago. We need to adapt to survive in new environmental conditions.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    It’s a good point that traits may not be useful now but could be useful later. Perhaps I just lack Imagination but I can’t visualize the change of season that’s going to make micropenis a survival advantage.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Evolution still doesn’t work that way. If it prevents you from reproducing (like this probably would), it will be selected against, meaning it will be extremely rare (like this is), but it will never just go away unless it isn’t compatible with life (eg, missing an X chromosome).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I have trouble processing the word “never” in your statements here because evolution has consigned so much to extinction that I don’t understand why traits can “never” disappear. Can you explain why a phenotype that would prevent you from reproducing can “never” lead to a genotype disappearing entirely? Blocking reproduction seems incompatible with life to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Because there are so many humans that someone’s almost definitely gonna have it. If there were like a million people, then we probably wouldn’t see many of these traits, but there are 8 billion people around. That means on average, traits that are one in a million are in 8,000 people. Traits that are one in a billion are still likely to be in a handful of people.

    If it’s incompatible with life, no one will have that trait, because no one will be born with it. If it merely prevents you from reproducing, it just won’t be heritable, but the mutations/anomalies will still happen, so people will have them.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I see the general point, it’s just the perforce absolutism of it that I don’t get.

    For example, if what you say is true and as long as a large population survives, all its genes necessarily do to, then shouldn’t there be people somewhere in some numbers that exhibit every trait in every one of our evolutionary ancestors? Even in your own examples you only go up to one in a billion, but odds do actually go lower than that.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    Sure, but your original question was about evolution getting rid of the genes necessary for a micropenis. That condition is very possible in our gene pool. Yes, there probably aren’t people who grow fins, even though that’s technically possible with enough specific mutations, so sure, evolution will eventually effectively get rid of traits in a species even if they’re not life threatening (though enough mutation for a human to grow fins would probably be deadly), but then your talking about evolution on the scale of millions of years.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Sometimes it's not the thing that gives an advantage, but the thing it's connected to. Perhaps the same same gene that gives them a micropenis also makes them really fit in some other area. It's unlikely, but possible that the genetic mutation makes them immune to some devastating disease in the future. Genetics are complex.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Sickle cell anemia is kinda like that. Carriers with one copy of the gene get resistance to malaria compared to those without it. People with two copies get the disease and are more vulnerable to Malaria than those without a copy.

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