Izzy
I have written and deleted 3 replies now. I hope this one works the best. I have read your posts long enough around here to know better than to accuse you of just stringing us along to provoke more answers and ire, so I have concluded that I just really am not understanding you.
I can only post here in the late evening or in the morning due to the life of a graduate student, so I may have missed things along the way. To help me understand, I have tried to summarize your views. I will then try to rebut them. Please tell me where my understanding of your views are wrong, and then tell me how you disagree with my rebuttal.
Your view is that there are some general assumptions that we can apply to people of different races. Namely, that Sickle Cell Disease, black skin, flat noses, and curly hair is of greater incidence in those that we identify as black in the USA. Even though you acccept there is no scientific entity as race, you believe that there is a truth somewhere there. From that, you say that it is important not to categorically dismiss other general assumptions, in this case that black men may have on average bigger penises than whites.
My response:
As you know, I am training to be a scientist and a physician. I would be silly as a physician not to take a person’s ethnicity into account when making a diagnosis. It is a piece of the puzzle – I should be more concerned about SCD in my African American patients than in my white patients. If a black kid presents with splenomegaly, I may jump to SCD before Gaucher Disease or Hereditary Spherocytosis. Or whatever. Of course I am not limited or blinded by it, but it is a piece of the puzzle regardless.
This all means nothing with regards to the OP. Penis size is probably as genetically determined as any other biometric measurement, like height, weight, and lung capacity. There is no reason to think that this one datum out of all of the rest of the biometric measurements would be somehow correlated to ethnic origin. The only other correlations we see beyond the ones listed above are ones caused by social or environmental cues. While these are often confounding, we have the luxury of examining similar populations in different places and circumstances to show the environmental process. Americans get type II diabetes with alarming frequency. North Indians generally don’t. Guess what happens when you raise North Indians in America? Type II diabetes. The same could be applied out to other interesting clinical tidbits, for instance Latino women getting gallstones or African Americans responding poorly to one antihypertensive drug class. All due to environment.
Again, penis size is probably as independent of environment as any other morphologic feature. So, you must take out the environmental cues. What you are left clinging to is some advantage large penises give in a tropical environment. While the studies in this subject are understandably lacking, the data do not support this. Since there is no plausible mechanistic explanation beyond this and we cannot form a coherent hypothesis, we deprecate the conclusion scientifically. Forgive me for constantly returning to science, but this is an observable datum, and therefore scrutable by all of our scientific techniques.
Even if penis size is more dependent on hormone exposure than other morphologic measurements, that should be obvious in a scientific study. A well ascertained and controlled study would take those of different races from a similar background. There are thought to be other consequences of prenatal hormone exposure beyond genital size. These should be noted as well. To the best of my knowledge, these consequences (ambiguous genitalia, maybe sexual preference) show no racial bias.
Again, the data are lacking in this area. As a scientist, I cannot absolutely draw a conclusion that there is no racial component to genital size due to either a environmental/hormone exposure mechanism (in which we would see subpopulation clustering) or some bizarre genetic advantage (in which case we would see the same genital size in populations of people who have evolved in similar environments). Simply the studies haven’t been done, and are not likely to be done because they are phenomenally uninteresting. But any difference would be able to be determined, despite flawed previous studies and stereotypes. Knowing what I know, though, I can say that the existence of a difference is a highly improbable hypothesis and therefore not worthy of my attention.
I’m just fascinated. Where do you get the extraordinary amount of patience and gentleness with which you approach each question?
