Are male nipples vestigial? Hogwash. In a recent survey, over 2,800,000,000 sperm were observed and interviewed, and the findings are very surprising.
It seems that when the male nipple is touched just prior to, or during intercourse, sperm swim up to 3 times faster in the vagina than the sperm that was ejaculated by men who didn't have their nipples touched. And because of the increased speed, the load from a nipple aroused male was 5 times more likely to impregnate an egg, as more sperm sped past all the dangerous obstacles in the vagina.
Surprisingly, the reason the sperm was faster, was because they were frightened and just wanted to get away from the male who had his nipples touched, in fact they were homophobic about it. 79% of the sperm interviewed stated that they were freaked out. One sperm was quoted as saying, "it scared the hell out of me that this dude was springing into action because his nipples were being rubbed. How gay is that?, I just swam as fast as I could to get away." Another sperm said "I thought for sure I was gonna die a smelly death in some dark hairy butt."
OK, now for some real science. 'During the early stages of human development all humans, both male and female, have the same initial body structure. This includes both sexual organs (although not yet fully developed) and nipples. In the later stages of development specific hormones are added to our bodies that will change the fetus's development to either male or female. Depending on the hormone, the other sexual organ is abandoned, and the dominant one develops fully.
Nipples, on the other hand, are developed prior to the body choosing its sex and are not effected by the new hormones. This means that nipples are not a sex organ, even though they seem like they would be. With that stated, you could ask why do men have arms and legs. But the problem remains that men don't use their nipples.
The real question should be, why do men still have nipples? Why haven't our bodies evolved to the point where men no longer have nipples? Well, evolutionary changes usually only occur to adjust to the environment. As far as breeding is concerned it doesn't matter whether males have nipples or not because women don't seem to look at nipple size as a type of attraction, thus men never evolved to the point where they would be removed.
Most mammals have a few vestigial body parts that haven't been removed yet by evolution. It's nothing to get worked up over, just remember that evolution is a very slow process.'
And continuing along these lines, author of The Puzzle, Louis Berman, has a pretty good theory on how this actually relates to homosexuality: "male homosexuality results from an interaction between inborn and social factors, and that an important inborn factor is low brain masculinization. Why do male brains have to become masculinized at a given stage of embryonic development? Because for the first six weeks of life, all embryos are proto-female. Afterwards, some male brains become more thoroughly masculinized than others. Males whose brains are masculinized to a lesser or minimal extent, are more likely to display gender-discordance, or to drift toward homosexuality as a way of correcting or accommodating to their felt deficit....At that early stage of prenatal life, there is a fork in the road of development. If there are no hormonal changes in the prenatal environment, the embryo developes into a female. If, however, the embryo is destined to become a male, its Y-chromosomes trigger the production of testosterone (the male hormone), which masculinizes the brain and genitalia (internal as well as external) of the embryo. But it takes no female hormone to produce a female infant. (Only at age ten or later does the female body begin to produce the hormones that transform the girl into a woman.)...But, there is some direct evidence, and lots of indirect evidence, that there is a wide range of variation in the degree to which the male brain is masculinized. The Puzzle argues that the low-masculinized brain shades the inner life of the individual with female thoughts, feelings, and wishes. This tendency, it is hypothesized, underlies gender-discordant behavior, fear of homosexuality, and homosexual behavior. "
This kind of stuff really blows the Fundies argument that homosexuality is a choice.
In fact, it makes me wonder if the men who are most opposed to homosexuality are also those whose brains didn't fully get masulinized, and they are fighting their own demons. Can any Fundies relate to this?
