h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

LOL - considering most male reactions to situations such as childbirth, macho attitudes etc, then yes - I guess I am.

Maybe some of our useless bodyparts are just hanging out, pretending to be asleep, until they get the signal
to become active. Imagine your appendix suddenly starting shifting all your inner organs at random just
because some millenium bug has called upon them: "No, I think the lungs should be placed at the toes, and
the heart should be placed about ... here .... there you have it: this is what God really intended.

Uhm.. *ahem* ... The appendix is neither dormant nor superfluous. It (along with the tonsils) helps protect us from filter viruses and other bacteria from our bloodstreams.

Male nipples have manifold uses.

1. They're erogenous zones, and thus are essential to both the propagation of the species and the proper use of a Friday night.

2. The area around them is rich in pheremone-producing glands. Whether pheremones have a role to play in humans is something of a controversial area, but it seems likely. A pheremone detecting organ has just been discovered (well, identified as such) in the human schnozz, which has thrilled anatomists and perfumiers alike.

3. Men can -- and do -- lactate. All the bits are there, and it has been recorded many times. The Dayak fruit bat from Malaysia --Dyacopterus spadiceus -- has functional mammary glands in the male, and Humbolt (the explorer) wrote about a 32-year old male human who breastfed his child (the 32-year old's, not Humbolt's) for five months. Some authorities think that any human male can lactate if suckled for a few weeks, but I have no experience of this beyond a day or two. There's also apocryphal evidence that lactation can be triggered by other stimuli, such as the child crying from hunger.

4. As someone else has pointed out, men and women are built from the same design. I'm not as squeamish as t'other chap, so will happily point out that the scrotum is the same as the labia major, with a join; the penis and the clitoris are very similar in many ways, etc. There's quite a large group of people where sexual differentiation has either not happened or happened haphazardly: human sexuality, 20th century culture and medical science being as they are, such people are perfectly capable of having sex lives as complex, messy and improbable as the rest of us.

5. that's probably enough

RW

Its a great deal more sinister than you think - why, for example, are all mens nipples between 7-8 inches apart regardless of their size.

OK - every male check this, as it may well be an old wives tale/urban myth....which just happens to be true in my case.

(Note for metric people, 7-8 inches is about 18-20cm)

I wish I didn't, I've just (accidently of course) got a load of Deep Heat over them and it's burning them to the point of dropping off, I'm in agony help...

I saw something about this recently on the goggle box.

Apparantly, "female" is the default condition for embryos. Whether the foetus develops into a boy depends on how much testosterone is swimming about in the mother.

So we were all female at one point in our lives

SWL I was reading this thread and was going to post the same thing! But I wasnt too sure abou the testosterone-in-the-mother thing - I thought it was that the baby's gender-to-be is determined at conception (i.e. it will become male if the sperm was carrying a Y chromosome) but the default development proceeds as female while the most important parts are being developed, then the sexual organs are differentiated last. Something about 6 or 8 weeks gestation rings a bell...

My biochemistry lecturer in uni also told us that men produce the hormones oxytocin and prolaction from the pituitary gland. These hormones stimulate lactation in females and can help with the progression of labour once it has started. But why males produce it, no one really knows.

was this a case of simul-thinking ?

Well you know what they say about great minds...

I believe a little known fact is that around 400 men per year die of breast cancer (I think it is 400).
Everyone knows about female breast cancer so there is a lot of professional screening and self examination. But since men's breast cancer is little known, the death rate is higher than women.
It seems there is also man's "Oh it is JUST a lump, so don't have to worry" attitude adding to deaths.

My theory is that when the event of sex differentiation began, female was the basic genetic basis and male the evolution of a primitive genome. So there are female and male.

That's why it's more probable for a male to have a female phenotype in case of bad expression of the so called human sexual genes (X and Y, but there are some vague evidences of relationships with other genes and mitochondrial genes also).

Having this background we could theorize that male nipples is just a gene/phenotype transition. Maybe with time male nipples will be no more...or not.

Sorry, wee correction needed.

It is the zygote which is female by default.