The Hard Science of Boners: TED Talk

Your erection news this morning comes not from your spam folder or ChatRoulette, or this awful tumblr about a man putting household items in his foreskin [NSFW], but from Diane Kelly, a zoologist at the University of Massachusetts. In the above video, she tells TED how studying the skeletal structures of earthworms helped her to explain the wall tissue of mammalian penises.

Through simple modelmaking, Kelly found that enlarged meat cigars share some common structural elements with hydrostatic skeletons (found in jellyfish, worms and nematodes). The difference in mammalian penile wall tissue, Kelly found, was the horizontal and vertical alignment of our wall tissue, whereas the organisms belonging to hydrostatic skeletons tend to operate more flexibly due to a diagonally composed tissue. While it might seem like a basic comparison of plaid fabrics, the discrepancy’s significance has sure excited Kelly, and should come as a great sigh of relief to Yahoo Answers’ OP, James C.

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