What could account for the fact that human female breasts vary so widely in size, within a range that is considered normal? Everybody knows women whose breast size, from one individual to another, varies within a range of about 10:1 ratio, and are considered normal size.
Is there any other part of the human body that can vary that much in size from one healthy person to another? Or, for that matter, in any other species of animal?
**Why are breasts so variable in size?
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The powers than be love men?
Moderator Note
Let’s avoid joke answers in GQ until some factual answers are posted. Nor do I want to see this become a thread about opinions about what size breasts you like. You’re welcome to start another thread in another forum about size preferences (or if you must) titty jokes.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
There is a book on every subject, which means I own a book on every subject. Specifically, I own Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams. And this exact question is asked.
But never answered. The question is raised during a look at why humans developed larger breasts than other primates. That answer appears to be for fat storage. She never gets around to a direct discussion of variability, even in the chapters devoted to breast augmentation.
I might have missed an answer, since I wasn’t reading for that, so you might want to find the book for yourself. It’s more breezy journalism than academic in tone and is a fast and fascinating read.
Yeah I picked up the book on an audible sale and while enjoyable the book didn’t really answer any of the questions I had about breasts in the first place.
This is all my best guess going from books I read and has nothing backing it but my memory, but the idea being that in the very beginnings of humanity breasts were uniform in size but as civilization advanced and different cultures took different ideas about breasts they became things for sexual arousal and as a result changed size accordingly. Some cultures preferred large breasts as an indicator of good health so in those societies the busty women were the ones with the most off-spring and their off-spring wound up passing the busty genes as well. In other societies the opposite happened, smaller breasts were valued as large breasts were believed to indicate women in poor health and those genes were spread. Though trade and mass migrations have made this less obvious in modern communities you can still see what societies valued large breasts based on their average cup size once you control for obesity and other stats. Russian women tend to be the bustiest in the world on average because in their society very large breasts were the most sexually attractive feature to men.
My WAG: women’s breasts are a secondary sex chacteristic that, for many men, heavily influences their attractiveness. This in turn affects whether or not women with certain breast chacteristics are likely to reproduce and pass the relevant genes on to their progeny.
All men do not have the same preferences for a given breast size (which is also affected by social factors, I expect), so it is not surprising that a wide variation of breast sizes might arise.
Googling led me to The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. I read only a few pertinent pages from here, so I can’t evaluate if there is any scientific backing for this or if the guy is a complete quack.
Miller suggests it is due to men selecting partners based on different indicators of fitness. One fitness indicator might be larger breasts, indicating adequate nutrition. Another might be a tall and muscular build, which is not necessarily correlated with breast size. Fitness indicators would be genetically prioritized under conditions of “scarce bodily resources.” In his view, this explains why “not all women have very large breasts - many women may be genetically programmed to prioritize other indicators of physical and mental fitness.”
I’m not totally sold on this.
Bellies and buttocks? Come to think of it, hands also; specifically male ones.
There’s this, but I’ll argue the opposite. Beyond a certain basic point, men are not particularly choosey. Within a certain range, breast size has no impact on, say, ability to feed a child properly. So as long as breasts are not so big they cause medical issues, and not so small that the children starve, any size is acceptable in an evolutionary sense.
It appears to me from random observation, that while approximate breast size is hereditary, the variation in size is either easily mutated, or influenced by random genes, environment and nutrition, etc. so size could change a certain amount from one generation to the next. Perhaps size is very “adaptable”.
There is decent variation in every culture, so I doubt that cultural influences have much result. I recall reading once about women in China with large breasts who complained it was perceived as a sign of promiscuity - but despite the negative (or positive, depending on gender viewpoint) connotations, there were still quite a few women so endowed.
Or, as I once mentioned when discussing this topic at the bar… “Anything over a mouthful is wasted, anyway.”
One o the other guys replied (timing it so I was in the middle of taking a swig) “If that’s the case, how come women never say the same about men?”
I don’t know if anyone has come up with any even remotely plausible theories on variation in breast size; there are plenty of WAGs but no evidence. My suspicion is that it’s a factor of, on the one hand, the degree of overall fat accumulation, and, on the other, random variation; the same as responsible for height / shape / side differences in any other body part.
The adult female breast in humans is largely fat; the mammary glands and associated plumbing don’t take up much space. Consequently, there is no “too small” to feed an infant; gorillas and chips nurse their young just fine with little breast development.
Lots of women have large breasts due to the fact that they’re overweight. Once you adjust for body weight I don’t think there’s much variability in breast size. Have you ever seen a thin woman with large natural breasts? Have you ever seen a morbidly obese woman (or man, for that matter) with small breasts? It’s not common.
It’s not uncommon for me to see thin (or at least below average in weight) women with large natural breasts.
While weight and other factors account for some of the variation, there’s still a lot of variation in women of low to average weight.
I would consider the upper limit of being “thin” to be 100 lbs for the first 5 ft. of height, plus an addition 5 lbs for every inch of height beyond 5 ft. And most people would consider the lower limit of “large” breasts to be a D cup.
Not very women who fall within this weight range will have natural D cups. I would guess that Russia would have the largest concentration of such women.
Ears, noses and feet?
I vaguely remember from my university days there is a statistical method where one measures all distances from some point, performs some arithmetic, squaring and summing and square-rooting -some such - to determine how similar or different curves are. Breast attracting so much attention, some one must have done a 3-D variation and compared them to other body parts.
I’ll be hard pressed to find the citation on this … but it does have a certain logic. What a man finds attractive in a woman is the hip-to-waist ratio … a nice broad birth channel delivers healthier children AND better odds the mother herself doesn’t die … it’s only been in the past hundred years that deliveries became routinely survivable.
Obviously there’s more to this and also obvious is we really don’t know what makes us attractive to one another … seems like all the research winds up as being inconclusive.
Beer … that’s gets everybody laid …
No - Poland.
(At least, from my admittedly unscientific observation. Polish women are by far the most commonly thin-waisted and busty. And, beautiful , if I might add).
Asian women are often smaller breasted. they are often very thin too.
Cite a gene study on why Asians have unique traits