What is the purpose of the female boobie?

[DougC]

• • • Two words: beach volleyball.
      ~

[FlippyFly]

@kanicbird

I sort of made the assumption only because it seems so obvious on a conscienous level.
1 - Baby takes milk from nipple
2 - Big Buffalo hold lots of meat, Big buffalo skin holds lots of water
2a Big = better
3 - Big boobies and nipples means lots of milk for babies (even if it’s not true)

Yes, and it seem like this is one such indicator. Men in general has to be hit over the head with an indicator to actually see it, and the boobie fits the bill nicely.

Your primate is certainly a very upstanding young man, thinking about the survival of his offspring and the safety of his child.

My primate, on the other hand, knows that number 2a is correct and then starts thinking about humping. Numbers 1,2, and 3, while maybe acknowledged, don’t enter my primate’s head when he is thinking about doing the horizontal tango.

[AHunter3]

ultrafilter:

I think you’re misunderstanding exactly what Morris is proposing. He’s not proposing that men are attracted to breasts because women have them. He’s proposing that men are attracted to breasts because men are attracted to the shape of the female buttocks and the breasts are shaped like the buttocks.

I’m the one who’s saying men are attracted to breasts becase women have them. Morris (as you rightly point out) says men are attracted to breasts because they look like asscheeks. He doesn’t defend this notion, just asserts it and since he got published, gee, it must be so. But one problem with that is that breasts don’t look very much like buttcheeks. Breasts inside of Wonderbras® sort of look like buttcheeks but that’s really not very relevant, is it?

Evolution on the whole doesn’t have a purpose in the sense of a grand design that it’s all working towards. However, individual traits can and definitely do have reasons to exist.

The emergence of the traits is not in response to any “reason to exist”. There may be a reason for traits to continue to exist, although it can be sufficient for there to simply fail to be a reason for those traits to be selected against.

If it was just a matter of fat storage, why wouldn’t we look more like the other great apes?

a) Same reason they don’t look like each other, to an extent — random happenstance.

b) Sheer luck of the draw plus no evolutionary disadvantages to our differences.

c) Many of our major diffs from the other hominids are characterics of neoteny, i.e., our species is infantile physically and developmentally. So instead of viewing them as a wide range of diffs, many characteristics setting us apart are just aspects of this one diff, this one mutation if you will. (I don’t, however, think that breasticles are part of that)