Penis Size: The True Average

Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They have a famously healthy diet. Why aren’t the Japanese already as tall as, if not taller than, Europeans?

You’re falling into the trap of thinking that any feature of a living creature must be there because it serves some evolutionary purpose. This is not true. Often things are left over as a vestigial version of something that used to be useful (like the appendix in humans) or is useful in the other sex (nipples on men). Some things are the way they are ‘just because’, due to accident or mutation or whatever. I mean, what purpose does it serve for some people to have blue eyes when most people in the world have brown eyes? None whatsoever. It’s a mutation that ‘caught on’, for some reason.

Yes, because scientists have already found out everything there is to know about everything! ;)

I’m straight, so the only erect penis I have direct experience of is my own. But I’ve seen a fair amount of porn, and yes I know the porn industry obviously exaggerates the racial differences - but why would the stereotype be there in the first place if there wasn’t some basis to it? And of the gay and bi guys here who’ve shagged their way around the world, several are saying there is a noticeable variation.

In truth, it doesn’t really matter, I agree (as long as people have condoms they can rely on, wherever they live!) - it’s just that studies on size tend to be conducted just in one country, so when talking about “average size” you have to bear in mind it just means average size in that country, among presumably healthy men who might agree to take part in a penis-measuring exercise.

Whites are “a minority” in the world. It’s far too simplistic to say “blacks are good at sport”, because there are many different kinds of sport. Try a quick experiment: do a Google Image search for “olympic sprinter”, “olympic marathon”, “olympic swimmer” and “olympic gymnast”. Now, do you notice anything about the people in these four sets of images?

Wibble, blacks are a minority in USA still most of top athletes are blacks. It’s not because white are a minority.

The stereotype is there not because is true : this is very bad phallacy, it’s basically saying that all stereotypes are true. Stereotypes have a different function - just to say one, mantaining the status quo.

Diet that makes people taller is basically a diet very rich in animal proteins - which is not per se more healthy, so the point on Japanese is phallacious.

Things, in evolution, aren’t there ‘just because they are’. A big penis, is a waste of energy if doesn’t serve to any purpose, so it can’t be there.

And so on for your other points. On some, you don’t even understood what I was saying - like the point is sport : it was not me starting arguing on the supposed superiority of a race toward another in sport, but Kubchaser. My point is more easily the adverse of what you understood : prevalence of a given race in sport isn’t so much a demonstration of inborn superiority, but is due to other factors.

A simple sentence would end all this nonsense : according to scientists, there isn’t anything like ‘different human races’, properly speaking. There isn’t enough variation from human people in different places to say they are different races like cockers and bulldogs. But none of you will understand this simple truth, because it doesn’t accords with prejudices and uneducated observation - one has eyes of a shape, another of another shape, they are different - NOPE! they are the same, like the same car painted in a different way.

That’s my whole point - most of the statistics out there are complete crap.

Whites dominate in most sports where the weather is below freezing!

I always wondered why there are so few blacks in the winter olympics….hmmmm.

You’re talking about sports that are popular spectator sports, and which favour strength and physical power. My point is simply that there are many different kinds of sports, which favour different kinds of fitness. Long-distance running is not nearly as popular a spectator sport in the US (I would assume) as, say, football or basketball. But when you see long-distance events in the Olympics or World Championships, it’s dominated not by American blacks (who tend to be of West African stock), but by Kenyans and Ethiopians. Likewise, swimming is dominated by people of North European heritage. There’s probably some socioeconomic factors here, but it can’t be the whole story. You don’t have to be rich to use a public swimming pool.

There’s a hypothesis that blacks in the Americas are over-represented in power sports because they were brought to the continent as slave labour. Slave traders would obviously have picked the most muscular slaves at the market, then a further selection pressure would have been applied by the horrific conditions of the Atlantic crossing and then during the harsh life as a slave.

Human beings are animals, and it’s fallacious to assume that the laws of evolutionary selection apply to every other animal but not us. It may sound awful, but yes, the slave trade was awful. And for good and for bad, its genetic legacy is there to be seen today.

I’m not saying stereotypes “are true”, I’m saying they often have some grain of truth. By your own argument, blacks dominate in many American athletics leagues, so it would be stupid to say that the stereotype “blacks are athletic” has no basis in truth, wouldn’t it?

In Britain, we have a tradition of “Irish jokes” about how the Irish are supposedly stupid. (I think the American equivalent is the “Polish joke”.) Now obviously there is not a genetic tendency towards stupidity in Irish people but in previous centuries, Ireland was a very underdeveloped country compared to much of Europe and most Irish people who came to Britain were uneducated, superstitious country folk looking for work as labourers. Ignorance and unsophistication are not the same thing as stupidity but to an educated, urbane person, it’s easy to conflate the two. Thus the “stupid Irishman” stereotype was born; a stereotype not actually true, but not totally without a basis, viz. Ireland’s lack of economic development and general “backwardness” compared to Victorian Britain.

The Japanese have lived on fish since forever. What are fish made of, if not animal protein? Even if you’re just talking about meat from land animals, most people in the Middle East eat a very meat-rich diet and always have done, yet they’re still generally not as tall as Europeans.

Well what about the peacock’s tail? Isn’t that a “waste of energy”? What about female breasts in humans? Most of the mass of a woman’s breasts is just inert fat, the actual milk glands are very small. A woman with small breasts - providing she’s not actually malnourished - is no less able to feed babies than one with huge hooters.

And really, I think your argument is pretty self-defeating. Why are we all here, if not to enlarge our penises? How’s that for a “waste of energy”?! And yes, some guys here are gay, but I should imagine most are straight, just as in the general population. We’re doing it at least in part to impress women, aren’t we? Just like the peacock’s tail, in fact!

I really don’t see what you’re getting at here. Yes, a red car and a blue car of the same make and model have the same engine, but they’re different colours. That’s a difference. And we’re talking about differences that go more than ‘paint deep’. When scientists say “there’s no such thing as race”, what they mean is that human beings can’t be discreetly divided up into several well-defined “breeds” or “subspecies”, as was once thought. That’s not to say there aren’t well-defined genetic differences between populations from different parts of the world. Things like resistance to disease, adaptation to extreme cold or heat, the ability to metabolise certain nutrients - all these things differ (statistically, of course) from population to population around the world.

[And sorry to pick up on this, but “phallacy”, applied to arguments about penis size, has to be the most serendipitous misspelling I’ve ever seen. :) ]

No, you can be in the desert, dying for siccity, poorer than the poorest man on earth, and still use a pubblic swimming pool or go skying.

Yawn.

Hahaha, because going for a swim costs roughly the same as going skydiving. Lol, whut?

You’ve seen Cool Runnings, right?

Blacks are better at running fast and jumping, east Africans better at marathons, whites (ones with names like Thor ver Thorsenen) are stronger. Asians are more suited to math and the preparation of convenient yet delicious take out. Explaining why is difficult, and is at best pseudo scientific and at worst racist. My feeling is that there are likely some differences in cock size, geographically speaking, but they’re probably less than the stereotypes imply.

Wibble, your sarcasm is out of place, really. Women breast augments or diminish depending on the caloric intake.

Best proteins aren’t those of fish but from milk, eggs and meat.

The argument about power and resistance is contradictory - both people come from Kenya.

There is a grain of salt about stereotype is wrong : you can spread stereotypes with a goal in mind; just repeat them many times and people exactly like you will believe they are true because ‘there has to be a grain fo salt’; and this ‘grain’, you can’t distract a second, becomes the whole.

That we are here to enlarge our penises doesn’t demonstrate that this isn’t a waste of energy. Man does many stupid things, and you presume that we all here aren’t crazy - which is clearly false.

And so on, Wibble, all the rest of your post is just as much depressing.

Times ago there was people exactly like you arguing that no way there could be a great black tennis player or golf player. And way earlier, that was said for rugby players and for soccer players.

And no white can become a good rapper, right?

This last sentence sums up my feelings pretty well. Pop culture, porn especially of course, has made people think the differences are bigger than they are - but I nonetheless think the differences are probably there nonetheless.

I can see that you’re kidding around about takeaway food and whatnot, but body size and shape really is determined by things other than food intake and exercise. I don’t see what this should be such a controversial thing to say. No-one would doubt it if you said it about any other species - why should humans not be subject to the same laws as every other living thing?

Marinera: some women are just predisposed to having big tits, and some to small. If calorie content was the be-all and end-all, then all women who eat lots would have huge tits and all women who don’t eat that much would have tiny tits. This is evidently not the case, even if I just think about the women I know.

Edit: and what do you mean, “both people came from Kenya”? The blacks who were taken to the Americas as slaves weren’t from Kenya, they were from West Africa. Unless you’re arguing that we’re all from East Africa - the Rift Valley, and all that - which I guess is ultimately true, but evolution has occurred since then, which is why we don’t all look like Kenyans.

Breast is not comparable with penis and has nothing to do with the energy saving-evolution argument because breast can shrink - just that simple. Comparing breast and penis is worse than comparing apples and oranges.

About the rest:

"…. Kenyan athletes may have won the majority of long distance racing events this decade but their victories cannot be inherently tied to their “Blackness” because a classification of these athletes as “African” cannot explain any deep set biological differences that one might purport they have in order to explain their prevalence for winning. The answer to their high success rate as runners must be innately tied to the social and cultural environment in which they find themselves.
…..

This crisis of whiteness within distance running can clearly be seen in the 1960
Olympic Games, when Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila won the Olympic gold in the
marathon, the standard for long distance running. Before 1960, the overwhelming
majority of medals awarded in long distance running had gone to White athletes
(Walton and Butryn, 2006:7). By the late 1980s, the American media had subverted
the African dominance in running in a way that spoke to White anxieties over their
“space” in the realm of distance running. In other words American media failed, quite
purposely, to provide any real coverage or attention to African American running victories
in order to maintain the illusion of White dominance in athletics. These “White
anxieties” over the dominance of non-White runners translated into genetic differences
almost immediately, with the popularly held assumption that racial physiology
must account for the recent African dominance in running.

…..

Statistically, Kenyans are no more genetically different from any other African or European population on average…… It is important to note here that the identifier Kenyan although often used as describing a biologically–or-genetically defined population instead denotes a nationality, a well-defined political and cultural group.

….
The fact that runners coming from Kenya do so well in running events attests to the fact the combination of intense high altitude training, consumption of a low-fat, high protein diet, and a social and
cultural expectation to succeed have created in recent decades an environment which
is highly conducive to producing excellent long-distance runners. It is important to
remember that until the early 1980s, Australian, American and British runners dominated
long distance running events. Simply put, athletic performance simply cannot
be labeled a race-related phenomenon if race is not a valid genetic or biological determinant."

The myth of race and sport

Some of you could find interestingthis quiz.

Durex didn’t do the study. It was carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research, who measured men visiting family planning groups. They said there was higher rate of REPORTED condom failure rate in India - 20% as opposed to 2% elsewhere.

Now that sort of discrepancy indicates to me that the correlation between the high failure rate of condoms in India and Indian men having smaller penises is dubious - notwithstanding the lack of information about which other countries have conducted similar surveys of failure rates in order to make sensible comparisons meaningful. (Has Sierra Leone done a survey? Has South Korea?) They did concede that at least part of the discrepancy was due to incorrect usage, but did indeed suggest that standard condom sizes were too large for SOME Indian men. However the Indian Condom manufacturer, Hindustan Latex, disputes this conclusion.

Interestingly, the same survey found that 60% of Indian men had penis sizes 5-6.1 inches long, and that 30 percent were between 3.9 and 4.9 inches. Now perhaps my memory is playing tricks, but this doesn’t seem radically different than the penis sizes found in most of the more credible surveys that have been posted here. Were all those carried out in India too?

The survey also found larger penis sizes in higher socio-economic groups. Read into that what you will, but it tells me that perhaps something else is going on beyond the simplistic conclusion that the results necessarily mean a link between penis size and race is proven.

But again, that’s a simplistic general analysis. The expression of specific genetic traits in practice is often misleading and complicated. How do you know that tall parents A, producing tall child A, weren’t taller than short parents B, producing short child B, for environmental reasons?

No. Everyone has the same muscles in the same place. They may be bigger or smaller, or stronger or weaker from person to person, but that’s about it.

And 70 years ago most successful boxers, sprinters and long-distance runners were white. The overwhelming majority of tennis players are still white, but the two best female players are not. Until the nineteen eighties there were virtually no black professional footballers (it’s “football” not “soccer”) in the entirety of English Professional and non-league football - some 400 teams. Coaches would openly state that “the black lads have flair, but they can’t cut it in the winter, or handle the physical side”. Today many of the “hard men” in the English game are black.

Most successful swimmers are not only white, but mostly not from poor working working-class American or European households. Interestingly Chinese swimmers won a number of medals at the last Olympics and are tipped to win more at the next and yet more as time goes on. If this prediction comes to pass, I wonder if in fifty years your son and grandson will be on some forum claiming that the success of Chinese swimmers is proof of a genetic link between mongoloid features and the ability to swim fast?

When I spent time in Trinidad some years ago, I was surprised to find that despite spending a lot of time on the beach, relatively few people could swim well. They tended to splash around in the shallows or a garden pool rather than swim seriously. Nobody I spoke to could tell me of a single public full-size swimming pool in the entire country. Although many people had garden pools, they were usually only suitable for this sort of leisure swimming. Probably because of this there was very little, if any, interest in competitive swimming.

To train to swim competitively at a high level you need adequate facilities - a proper indoor pool of sufficient size and decent coaching. I’m guessing, but I suspect these are in very short supply in Africa and the Caribbean and in poor areas of Brazil, the US and Northern Europe, where most other people of afro-caribbean descent reside.

*Sigh*. Where is your actual evidence that this statement is true for “black” women as a whole, beyond casual observation and cultural stereotype? What precisely do you mean by “Black” in the scientific sense that you would need to define if your statement was to be empirically, or even axiomatically provable? How much melanin would she need in her skin and what exact skin tone would she need to be included in your sample population? Would she be of West or East African descent, or from the Caribbean?

I repeat - porn is not a representative sample of anything. It exists to feed fantasies and create illusions and therefore is utterly useless as evidence for any proposition whatsoever. Do you think that Caucasian women tend to have smaller and tidier outer vaginal lips than other races, or are more petite?

No, since “huge” is a subjective term. However I am convinced that he (and other porn stars) are nowhere near as big as they often appear to be on screen at first glance. Not solely because of “camera tricks” in the narrow sense, but, in addition to said tricks, because of such things as routinely using very petite girls and the fact that Mandingo himself appears to be very short indeed (as do the likes of Richard Mann and Biggz).

As you wish. For my part I think you’re easily fooled.

Exactly. And therefore useless as evidence of your assertion that black men have bigger penises,

And if from this you are concluding that black men have larger penises, then not only are you contradicting yourself in the space of one sentence, but you are guilty of a whopping non-sequitur that goes, “a higher proportion of black porn stars have big penises, therefore so do black men in the general population”.

No.That is completely wrong even though that is a common misconception (and as an expert researcher in a discussion on the subject of genetics on UK radio station Five Live recently pointed out) one that is even held by many medical professionals. The Greek population in areas where the disease is particularly high are not of a different ethnicity than those in Athens - any more than the black African populations in areas of Africa where the disease is prevalent are not of a different ethnicity than black African populations where the disease is not. It’s a demonstration of a correlation between disease and genetics, but not of disease and ethnicity - at least not the way the term ethnicity is commonly used and is being used here.

In any case this discussion is all very interesting, but to a degree it’s something of a red herring. Even if you were able to prove the genetic links you detail in your examples exist in reality, all it would prove is that a link between penis size and race is possible - not that it actually exists.

Until someone can produce a survey with credible methodology that proves such a link - I.e not one that surveys the size of jockstraps bought in local menswear shops of various countries and seeks to draw bald conclusions from the data - there is nothing to prove a correlation between penis size and race.

No. But if you are rich, you are more likely to live in an area where one exists within a convenient distance. Nor are the fees for using one likely to be an issue. They are also more likely to be of a standard and in a state of repair that encourages you to use them. The school you attend (that is if there IS as school to attend) is more likely to place an importance on taking part in swimming at school and in competitive swimming in general. You are more likely to have role models from your community to inspire you, along with contemporaries who either share your interest, or who will provide positive affirmation about your involvement. If you do prove to have talent to succeed, you are more likely to have access to the sort opf coaching and support that will encourage you to pursue the sport and stay motivated.

Really? Then it’s a pretty stupid hypothesis in my opinion. Black people are over-represented in the field of best-selling popular music. Is this because many were brought to the continent to give a rousing rendition of the latest negro spriitual in order to spur on the cotton-pickers to even greater productivity in the Massa’s plantation? Are white Americans overrepresented in swimming becasuse those that couldn’t afford the passage from Europe to the US had to get there somehow?

You really must stop making firm assertions and claiming they are facts. These statements are either illogical or downright false.

In the first place between tens and hundreds of millions of people were transported from Africa in the space of a few hundred years. The idea that they were all carefully selected for muscularity is simply ridiculous. Muscularity is something that can easily acquired to the standard necessary to be a productive slave, so selecting for a tendency to elite strength and power among such an enormous population would have been a total waste of time and money. It’s possible, even probable that slaves with obvious genetic defects , such as Spina Bifida, were rejected, but this is an entirely different scenario to the one you claim existed.

The sort of natural selection produced by the mortality on slave ships would hardly have resulted in those genetically predisposed to speed and physical strength surviving at the expense of others - these factors don’t protect you against the sort of diseases that killed slaves, such as dysentery and scurvy. In any case your central premise is wrong. Slaves were treated like cattle and while this treatment was undoubtedly vicious, appalling and dehumanising, it was not generally fataly in itself. You don’t particualrly care if your cattle are happy or in non-fatal pain, but you don’t usually show cavalier disregard as to whether the beasts of burden you’ve paid good money for live or die .

The truth is that the rate of mortality on slave ships was between 12-15 % (far less on British ships). While shocking, this was actually LESS than the mortality rate for sailors and passengers on the same journeys at the time.

The mortality rate of slaves in the continental US was significantly less than everywhere else in the New World and not hugely greater than that of poor whites - mainly due to the fact that the tasks they performed were less gruelling than those in the likes of the West Indies and Brazil. American blacks first harvested tobacco and later cotton and foodstuffs such as corn. They also worked in industry. If your claim is true, then surely there should be proportionally more Brazilian and Jamaican boxers than American ones?

Another false assertion.

There are no “laws of evolutionary selection”. There is A law of Natural Selection in the Theory of Evolution, but human evolution usually takes place over a far longer period than the Slave Trade. What you are talking about is more accurately selective breeding, but to prove that this was responsible for the overrepresentation of Black Americans in power sports you would need to show that there was a higher survival rate among those slave children predisposed to speed and power, or that for some other reason they were less likely to have children once they were of reproductive age. For example if it was the case that Slave masters systematically prevented weaker and slower slaves from having sex, or that they killed the offspring of such slaves before they could themselves reproduce, your argument might hold water, but I’m not aware of anything like this ever having taken place on a sufficient scale.

Mortality among a population cannot possibly lead to selective breeding if the dead individuals have already reproduced - so your basic proposition makes no sense.

No it wouldn’t, because the proposition has never been proved. It would be stupid to say that “blacks are over-represented in activities that require athleticism” has no basis in truth, but that is something entirely different.

Not true. The Irish stereotype goes back long before that. The Irish were viewed as not fully equivalent to the White race by the British for centuries. It is probably a feature of the history of the subjugation of Ireland by Britain and the inevitable negative stereotypes that sort of conflict always brings in it’s wake.

Notwithstanding the fact that Irishmen and Englishmen have moved between the countries for centuries, the main influx occured after the potato famine of the mid nineteenth century (and to a lesser extent because of the economic problems after the founding of the Free State in the nineteen twenties). The idea that the Irish were any more uneducated and superstitious than in Britain is ridiculous. Ireland was a full part of Britain and not a colony for over 100 years from 1801, with seats in the House Of Commons and Irish Peerages (the current Chancellor George Osborne, is the heir to one of the most prominent and historic Irish peerages I believe). In fact the officical name of the state was, “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” as opposed to the “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” today. Someone from Dublin came from the same country as someone from London - therefore the level of compulsory state education was identical. In fact in some ways the Irish were probably more educated than the English, as there was a culture of fee-paying schools for the lower classes until state education was introduced in the late ninteenth century. In any case to imply that the average Englishman was some kind of educated sophisticate in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign one-third of the UK population was completely illiterate.

Nonsense. That would only be true for some coastal populations. Prior to modern refrigeration, fish was difficult and costly to preserve and transport. It was only eaten by most Japanese on special occasions. Meat and dairy was traditionally taboo under Shinto buddhism, so the majority of the population was largely vegetarian, with the most important foodstuff being rice. Fish might be an important part of the Japanese diet today, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon borne of technological improvements, the radical reorganisation of Japanese society after defeat in the war (I.e democracy and less economic inequality) and the boom in the Japanese economy after the Korean War.

http://www.camb ridge.org/us/bo … kiple/japan.htm

Strangely with increasing prosperity, the Japanese are no longer as short as the stereotype suggests. With very slight variations depending on the survey, the average height of a Japanese man is now 5’7.5”. That is identical to that of Jamaicans and taller than the male populations of Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, The Gambia and Malawi. It is MUCH taller than that of the male population of Nigeria (5’ 4.5”) the country which contains by far the single biggest population of Black Africans. (Something like 1 in 7 or 1 in 10 humans of Black African origin is a Nigerian; I forget the exact figure). |Interestingly there is no significant difference between the average height of Black and White Americans. In fact where there is a difference in a survey, Whites are taller by half an inch. How that fits in with your theory that blacks are “bigger and stronger” than whites is beyond me.

http://en.wikip edia.org/wiki/H … round_the_world

Notwithstanding yet another of your sweeping generalisations (The Middle-East is a big and diverse place) meat is usually relatively expensive in most countries, when compared to cereals, grains and fruit and vegetables . Given that large numbers of the population in many Middle-Eastern countries are very poor, I would question whether their staple diet really is “meat-rich”. National cuisine and average diet can be two very different things.

Regardless, your argument is false in this instance as well. There are Middle-Eastern Countries such as Egypt, where the average height is identical to, or greater than that of some European countries, such as Italy, Spain and Portugal. Interestingly there is a divide between the traditionally rich Northern European countries, with commensurate healthcare and social welfare systems and the traditionally poorer southern European ones.

I think you are getting too hung up on the issue of diet in any case. It is environmental factors impacting on health that are important, of whih diet is one. However such things as healthcare and housing are also important.

You don’t seem to understand the principle of natural selection, as your earlier examples seem to demonstrate.

The Peacock’s tale is a characteristic that is easily visible in a potential mate. A peacock’s tail is male sexual display, designed to attract the female. Therefore a female peacock will mate with the peacock with the most impressive tail and his offspring will be most likely to be born. Peacocks with unimpressive tails or other animals that lose the competiton for sexual favours, may well not get to mate at all during the mating season, since there is a limited window of opportunity. This is not so definite a trend in humans as we can mate at any time and the criteria for being the preferred choice of fertile females is much more complicated than in animals. Desirable sexual characteristics are transient and culturally based to some degree - being a footballer might get you more opportunities to mate with a high-status female in the UK and Brazil in 2011, but not in India in 2111. As a general rule human males whose characteristics may be considered less desirable to contemporary human females will still get to mate and reproduce if they want to - just not with their first choice female.

But this is a personal choice that is unlikely to have any impact on sexual selection.

How does a big penis confer an evolutionary advantage? Unless it is true that men with smaller penises are somehow significantly less likely to reproduce, then even if women prefer men with big penises, which is far from proven, average penis size will not be influenced by this preference. This could only be true if women in general refuse to sleep with men with smaller penises, or get pregnant by them less often, or that having a parent with a small penis is associated with a higher pre-pubescent mortality rate (I.e you die before you can reproduce). In other words, if men with shorter penises generally have fewer offspring than those with larger ones.

In much the same way, bigger breasts do not confer an evolutionary advantage as such. Women with small breasts (for the purposes of this argument, a less desirable secondary sexual characteristic) still get to have children. We do not commonly see maternity wards overwhelmingly populated by women possessing enormous breasts, with childless flat-chested women staring plaintively through the window. Female breast size may be increasing in some countries like the UK, but as with height, the reasons are probably environmentally based. As I’ve already pointed out, mate selection and reproductive success is far more complex in humans than in non-human animals. This is where the rationale behind your argument about penis size and race falls down.

Many on this site are doing it because they THINK it will impress women. The distinction is important.

I’m afraid to say that increasing the size of your penis will make no difference to your ability to have children, so it is not like the Peacock’s tail at all. Even if it were proven that having a big penis increased a woman’ sexual pleasure, which is dubious, it would make no difference - women do not need to enjoy sex to get pregnant. Since the complexity and colourfulness of the Peacock’s tail most certainly does make a difference to his ability to have children, the difference between the two examples shoud be clear.

That much is obvious. But it would be absurd to suggest that the colour of the car changed the way the engine worked.

No. You’re the one asserting that the differences go more than “paint deep”. However you have yet to mount a convincing argument to support this theory.

Yes. The Human race is a continuum with no sharp breaks.

No. There are well-defined genetic TRENDS among populations with ancestors who originated in different parts of the world. However these people don’t have to share an outward physical appearance (phenotype) with those ancestors or even with others carrying the same gene. While you might be statistically more likely to find more of a certain gene among the population of a particular location or race, you could theoretically find examples of the same characteristic everywhere.

Again, no. The TENDENCY to posessing these characteristics differs. A significantly higher number of Japanese can’t metabolise alcohol efficiently than many other races and a significant higher number of caucasians suffer some cystic fibrosis. However you can still find Japanes people that can drink Ernest Hemingay under the table and black people with Cystic Fibrosis.

I think the problem might be arisung if, like many people you are overestimating the size of the gene pool, based on the fact that the human population is very large and that some human beings have variable external characteristics (I.e they look very differen)t. DNA sequencing has shown this believe to be completely false.

It is a curious fact that mankind has a far lower rate of genetic diversity than the size of the human population suggests. In fact there is more genetic diversity among the chimpazee population of Africa than among the entire human race, despite the fact that chimpanzees have much less superficial diversity. Chimpanzees have 20 times the gentic diversity of humans - no two human beings are more distantly related than something like fiftieth cousins (I forget the exact number but it’s something around that).

One theoryfor the reason behind this (the Toba Catastrophe Theory) is that at some time in human pre-history, or in the history of our immediate ancestors, some catastrophic event wiped out most of the population, leading us to be descended from a very small number of individuals.

[And sorry to pick up on this, but “phallacy”, applied to arguments about penis size, has to be the most serendipitous misspelling I’ve ever seen. :) ]