Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  But in any event, the exchange reminded me of the German sociologist Michael Blume’s research on reproduction and religiosity. And it occurred to me that religiously motivated homophobia may be at least partially rooted in this assumption that gay people are shirking their human reproductive obligations. I detected a strong whiff of religious residue in the employee’s comments about homosexuality, which given the churchliness of Northern Ireland probably wasn’t my imagination.

  In evolutionary biological terms, where natural selection occurs at the level of the gene, not at the level of the species, there are serious flaws in this person’s conjecture about lineal reproduction. Modern technological methods helping gays to be parents aside, there are many ways that childless individuals can still be genetically successful, in some cases more so than simply being a biological parent, such as investing heavily in biological kin who share their genes. (In scientific parlance, this is known as kin selection or inclusive genetic fitness.) Having said that, I’ll acknowledge he was not entirely wrong about the prime evolutionary significance of reproduction either. People really do need to reproduce, either directly or indirectly, for nature to continue operating on their genes. This is not the “reason” or “purpose” we’re here, as that would insinuate some form of intelligent design for human existence; rather, it’s just a mechanical fact.

  But all of this gets really interesting, says Blume, where the illusion of intelligent design intersects with a reproductive imperative—essentially, the commonplace idea that God “wants” or “intends” or “demands” us, as faithful members of our communities, to have a litter of similarly believing children. You’ve been blessed with your pleasure-giving loins for a reason, so the logic goes, and that’s to get married to the opposite sex and to breed. By God, just look at the Old Testament. “Be fruitful and multiply” is the very first of 661 direct commandments. God seems to be not merely making a suggestion here but issuing a no-nonsense order.

  Blume has found that those religions that actually put this issue front and center in their teachings are—for rather obvious reasons—at a selective group advantage over those that fail to endorse this stern commandment. He reviews several religions that are either already extinct or presently disappearing because they strayed too far from this reproductive principle. The Shakers, for example, hindered and even forbade reproduction among their own followers, instead placing their emphasis on missionary work, proselytizing, and the conversion of outsiders. But this turned out to be a foolish strategy, evolutionarily speaking. “In the long run,” Blume points out, “mass conversions happen to be the historic exception, not the rule. Most of the time, only fractions of populations tend to convert from the religious mythology handed to them vertically by their parents and they convert into different directions … Communities who start to lack young members also tend to lose their missionary appeal to other young people. Therefore, the Shakers overaged and deteriorated.”

  Some religious splinter groups have also tinkered a bit too much with God’s reproductive imperative, even exploring eugenics by attempting to “perfect” communal offspring. Such a calculated, deliberate scheme of human breeding may backfire, however, if it also means preventing couples from reproducing at their own personal discretion. This was part of the downfall of the Oneida Community of upstate New York, a nineteenth-century Christian commune that had a very practical—almost too practical—view of human sexuality. Reproduction was tightly regulated by a eugenics system known as stirpiculture. Over several generations, Oneida Community physicians mated men and women who were carefully selected for their genetic health (I saw some of the handwritten medical records while going through the archives at the Kinsey Institute, and I can assure you that the breeding system was real and meticulous). Children born through this process of artificial selection were raised communally, and maternal bonding was discouraged.

  To prevent unplanned, nonengineered children, the Oneida members implemented a variety of controls, including encouraging teenage boys to have sex with postmenopausal women. This simultaneously stemmed both parties’ libidos and, in forging personal alliances between the two, provided important ecumenical tutelage to the youth by the very devout older women. Adult men practiced male continence, a sexual “technique” in which males do not ejaculate during intercourse; given that Oneida also had polyamorous relationships, this was key for stirpiculture purposes.

  All of this may sound logical in theory, even unusually rational as far as religions go, but the tight regulations meant a quick death for the Oneida Community. After only about thirty years and peaking at just a couple of hundred members, the religious commune officially dissolved in 1881. Its members, presumably of good genetic stock but scanty in ranks, went into the silverware trade instead; today the Oneida Community is known as the hugely successful company Oneida Limited.

  By contrast, similarly insulated, nonproselytizing religions that encourage their members to proliferate alleles the old-fashioned way—such as Orthodox Jews, the Hutterites, and the Amish—and also emphasize “homegrown” faith in which members are born into the group and indoctrinated, are thriving. The story of the Amish is particularly impressive, having seen an exponential explosion in their numbers over a very short span of time. The Amish emerged as a branch of the Anabaptist movement in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and about four thousand of them fled Germany to avoid persecution and found refuge in the United States and Canada during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most people know that the Amish are extremely insular, shunning almost all contact with the non-Amish world—except during the brief Rumspringa (or “jumping around”) period, in which not-yet-baptized Amish youth flirt with the devilish goods outside before deciding whether or not to return to their family and faith. For boys, one incentive for returning to the community is that if you want to have sex with (that is, marry) a local Amish girl, you have to be baptized first, which is only for those who come home. Eighty percent do.

  What you may not know is that the Amish population has been swelling since the sect’s arrival in the New World. With growth rates hovering between 4 and 6 percent per year, their numbers double every twenty years or so. In 2008 they numbered 231,000; the year before, it was 218,000. Having children is a heavenly blessing, but it’s also an official duty. With an average of six to eight children born to each Amish woman, and with 80 percent of those returning to the group after their Rumspringa, this extraordinary growth rate is easy to understand. What’s especially ironic, Blume points out, is that the Amish’s original country of origin, Germany, has been succumbing to sharp population declines for decades: “The closing of churches has been followed by that of playgrounds, kindergartens, schools and whole settlements.” At least in sheer numbers, then, it seems that the Amish—long ridiculed by their European countrymen as the “dumb Germans” who wouldn’t give up their silly archaic beliefs—are having the last laugh.

  In fact, Blume’s research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically outreproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who “never” attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; “once per month,” and the average goes up to 2.01 children; “more than once a week,” 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly.

  Some of the strongest data from Blume’s analyses, however, come from a Swiss Statistical Office poll conducted in the year 2000. These data are especially valuable because nearly the entire Swiss population answered this questionnaire—6,972,244 individuals, amounting to 95.67 percent of the population—which included a question about religious denomination. “The results are highly significant,” writes Blume: “Women among all denominational categories give birth
to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries.”

  In other words, it’s not just that “educated” or “upper-class” people have fewer children and tend also to be less religious, but even when you control for such things statistically, religiosity independently predicts the number of offspring born to mothers. Even flailing religious denominations that place their emphasis on converting outsiders, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, are outreproducing nonreligious mothers. Hindus (2.79 births per woman), Muslims (2.44), and Jews (2.06), meanwhile, are prolific producers of human beings. Nonreligious Swiss mothers bear a measly 1.11 children.

  Blume recognizes, of course, the limits in inferring too much from these data. It’s not entirely clear whether being religious causes people to have more children, or whether—as is somewhat less plausible but also possible—the link is being driven in the opposite direction (with people who have more children becoming more religious). Most likely, it’s both. Nevertheless, Blume speculates on some intriguing causal pathways tied to the fact that religious people have more children. We know from twin studies, for example, that the emotional components of religiosity are heritable. “Religiosity” refers to the intensity of feelings about religion, not the propositional content of particular beliefs. (In other words, one identical twin might be a screaming atheist, while the other is an evangelical pastor, but they’re both hot and bothered by God.) So Blume surmises that any offspring born to religious parents are not only dyed in the wool of their faith through their culture but also genetically more susceptible to indoctrination than are children born to nonreligious parents.

  The whole situation doesn’t bode well for secularist movements, in any event. Evolutionary biology works by a law of numbers, not rational sentiments. Blume, who doesn’t try to hide his own religious beliefs, sees the cruel irony in this as well: “Some naturalists are trying to get rid of our evolved abilities of religiosity by quoting biology. But from an evolutionary as well as philosophic perspective, it may seem rather odd to try to defeat nature with naturalistic arguments.”

  As a childless gay atheistic soul born to a limply interfaith couple, I suspect, perhaps for the better, that my own genes have a very mortal future ahead. As for the rest of you godless heterosexual couples reading this, toss your contraceptives and get busy in the bedroom. Either that or, perish the thought, God isn’t going away any time soon.

  Planting Roots with My Dead Mother

  Mother’s Day is forever tinged with a certain sadness for me because it’s the day I accompanied my mother many years ago to the cemetery where she’s been interred ever since. Well, that’s not entirely true. She didn’t die that very day; death wouldn’t come for another six months yet.

  We were in the funeral home to shop for a shiny new casket and make final arrangements for her corpse, an unwelcome visitor that would be arriving some time soon, though precisely when even the doctors couldn’t say. For her peace of mind if nothing else, she was intent on tidying up the financial and administrative minutiae that come with dying as a human being. As soon as the umbilical cord is cut, after all, we’re attached to another made of red tape, and that one grows longer with each passing year, so that we die tangled up in it in the end.

  I don’t know why she chose Mother’s Day of all days for such a lachrymal task as this, but she did have a tragedian’s air to her—one, I might add, that was well deserved given all she’d been through. Before she was forty, she’d had a mastectomy from breast cancer along with several long bouts of chemotherapy. This was followed by cancer in the other breast a few years later and another mastectomy. Within the decade, my parents would have a sudden and bitter divorce, and within a few months of the divorce, just as she was “getting back on her feet,” she was dealt another heavy blow, diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, and had to undergo more surgeries and seven more embattled years of chemotherapy. She died—begrudgingly—at just fifty-four.

  It’s a very sad story, needless to say, and unfortunately one that is shared by too many other loving and wonderful mothers who will not be with us on the next Mother’s Day. The fact that I was conducting research on people’s afterlife beliefs at the time of her death stemmed almost entirely from the many theoretically inspiring and insightful conversations I had with her as she tried to imagine her own afterlife. (She leaned toward scientific materialism, but she wasn’t an atheist and had an open mind about the whole affair, I think it’s safe to say.)

  Among the more unpleasant aspects of this tale—both for her at the time and for my siblings and me still now—were the gloomy logistics of arranging her burial. What sticks out in my mind most of all from that Mother’s Day 2000 is the image of my mom with her trembling hands flipping through an L.L.Bean-type catalog handed to her by a pleasant enough but benumbed funeral home director. It was a rather hefty booklet filled with glossy images of all the latest models of caskets, vaults, urns, catafalques, headstones, and other new products then in funerary vogue, this particular collection especially suitable for middle-class cadavers. Since she died near Fort Lauderdale wanting to be closer to her own mother, she found herself in a part of the country especially profitable to the death industry, the area being a geographic hub of the elderly.

  The whole affair that day left a bad taste in my mouth. There was something so plastic, so slick, so “commercial” about this business of death that—much like the rest of an overdeveloped South Florida where this bland, freeway-hugging cemetery is laid—felt much too cold to me. Modern cemeteries, with their zero lot lines, perfectly manicured hedgerows, and identical-looking headstones, have become eerily similar to the suburbs; or perhaps the suburbs have become eerily similar to cemeteries. Either way, what bothers me most of all is that, looking back, it didn’t have to be like this.

  Death is rarely pleasant, of course, no matter how one’s body is disposed of. But in recent years, I have become increasingly interested in “green burial,” a blanket term that refers to any “alternative” funerary practice in which the deceased is buried in a biodegradable casket or shroud, often in nature preserves, and without embalming preservatives (fluids that keep a corpse pretty, usually just for viewing purposes) that dramatically slow down and disrupt the natural decomposition process.

  Although it’s the subject of continuing debate and the actual health implications remain unclear, these embalming chemicals may become contaminants as formaldehyde and other potentially carcinogenic agents are absorbed into the soil and groundwater. Green burial advocates have cast the issue almost entirely in terms of avoiding the staggering environmental impact of traditional burial. Consider that before this year is over, Americans will bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 90,272 tons of steel (caskets), 2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets), 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults), 14,000 tons of steel (vaults), and more than 30 million board feet of hardwoods (much of it tropical; caskets). Then there are the countless acres of land bulldozed over for these bald landfills of synthetic human remains.

  Cremation isn’t much of an improvement over such things. Going up in smoke may use fewer natural resources than traditional burial, but it also consumes a significant amount of fossil fuels. According to a statement by the Trust for Natural Legacies, a nonprofit land conservation organization working to drive the sustainable growth of green burial practices in the Midwest, “You could drive about 4,800 miles on the energy equivalent of the energy used to cremate someone—and to the moon and back 83 times on the energy from all cremations in one year in the U.S.” There’s also the non-negligible problem of mercury being released into the atmosphere whenever a person with amalgam dental fillings is cremated.

  These environmental concerns alone make green burial an obvious solution. But as a psychologist, and one who’s also had a negative pe
rsonal experience with burying a loved one in the traditional manner, I think our conception of death and burial needs a serious rethink. Let’s close the lid on those anonymous, revenue-driven, laminated cultural practices of commercial burial that we’ve all become so complacent about. There’s got to be a better way to go about it than what we’ve been doing all these years. And one specific form of green burial, which I’ll outline in a moment, is win-win.

  Although the idea of green burials in wildlife preserves or parklike settings is not new, and it’s likely a desirable prospect for certain future dead souls who’d prefer absolute oblivion, it seems to me that this is not going to appeal to most individuals because we human beings tend to have a pressing need for “symbolic immortality.” This was a term coined by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death, but it has since been empirically elaborated by scientists working on terror management theory. The basic idea behind symbolic immortality is that cultural artifacts that survive the individual’s literal death while also containing some reminder of the person’s special existence can meaningfully reduce human death anxiety.

  There are many nuances to terror management theory and this construct, but the important point to mention here is that a sense of symbolic immortality can be obtained by concrete markers of prosperity, anything from benches in the park with dead people’s names etched in gold, to graffiti on boxcars, to initials carved into a tree, to headstones in a graveyard. So while conventional cemeteries may be unnecessarily gloomy, they do at least satisfy this psychological need for people to remain embedded, even if just symbolically by way of lifeless granite headstones, in the immortal culture. If the green burial industry is ever to take off and begin appealing to more people, I suspect that this is one key issue—physical memorializing—that advocates are going to need to address.