The Baculum--The Penis Bone

Every time reports are released bemoaning the state of scientific knowledge among American youth, we wring our hands, collectively mumble that the Asians and Indians will soon surpass us, and then go to the fridge to get the beer and chips to return to the football game. After all, a team with players that has no relation to the city in which it is located might be beating another such team. But ever since I have plunged into the world of mammals a few weeks ago, both as a way to honor the 300th year anniversary of Linnaeus' birth and to assuage my guilt for not knowing the spelling of guenon in a Spelling Bee, I have thought a great deal about why Americans don't like science. I wrote an article on this subject in the mid-1980s when I was on the Board of Associates for the then-Oregon Graduate Center. In that article, I reflected on my own experience in high school, where I won the award for laboratory science but then dropped out of science as soon as I could in college. My argument was that people don't like science because of the attitudes of scientists--they act like they "own the field."

But now, when I have become a man, I have given up childish ways and arguments and want to advance another explantion. It is simply that science, as it is or has been taught, isn't visual enough. That is, the study of science gives you the impression that you have to leave your senses in order to study it. I recall this was my experience with biology, where we studied cells and had to imagine protons, neutrons and electrons racing around nuclei; I recall this was the reality in chemistry, where periodic tables had to be learned and atomic numbers memorized. Physics was worse, and advanced math worse still. Science was presented as a, well, non-humanistic discipline. That is the basic problem of the teaching of science--it removes the human or sensual dimension to the study. As a result, it quashes rather than encourages creativity.

Introducing the Baculum--the Penis Bone

For example, if I were to teach a class on biology, I think I would begin with the baculum. As it was, I never learned about this interesting bone until I began combing through the mammals recently. Information about it is "out there," but I don't remember anyone mentioning it to me or using the story of the baculum to reflect on the human condition. In short, the baculum is a short or long bone, situated in the stomach of many mammals, which is an aid in copulation. It helps sex, in other words. How does it do so? Well, as this site explains, "The penis bone is kept in the abdomen and, when needed, a set of muscles push it into a sheath in the fleshy part of the penis." Thus, it makes sure that the penis will become erect very quickly and will stay so for the duration of copulation. In fact, one might say that the baculum is primarily for speed--it enables almost immediate erection. And, the presence of the baculum explains why a mammal like a lion (family Felidae of the Carnivores) can have up to 250 copulations in 4 days (just think if the porn industry ever discovered that), even if each copulation lasts just 30-70 seconds. And, on the length of these bones: The length of these bones varies from a few inches to, drum roll, more than 20 inches in the walrus. Now I understand John Lennon's song a little better.... A partial list of which male mammals have a baculum and which don't is here:

Mammals with baculum include: canids, felids, rats, walruses (all of which are carnivora), while those that don't have one are humans (all other primates do, as I understand), equids, marsupials, lagomorphs and hyenas. In fact, here is a web site advertising bacula you might want to purchase. Some of the exemplars it pictures are: (1) large raccoon baculum (they belong to the family Procyonidae of the Carnivore order of Mammals); (2) small raccoon baculum; (3) gray wolf baculum (they belong to the family Canidae of the Carnivore order of Mammals); (4) wolverine baculum (whether or not from Michigan, they belong to the Mustelidae familiy of Carnivores); river otter baculum (a marten; also of the Mustelidae family); (5) the striped skunk baculum (belong to the Mephitidae, a family of Carnivores just recently carved out of the Mustelidae--who says that taxonomy is going nowhere?), etc. Thus, you could always keep a penis bone at the ready if you wanted it.

Incidentally, the oosik of Native Alaskan cultures is a polished penile bone of walruses (family Odobenidae of the Carnivores), seals (Phocidae/Carnivore); sea lions (Otariidae/Carnivores), and polar bears (Ursidae/Carnivore) [Don't think that the world just consists of carnivores; there are only about 285 species of them in the world, divided into about 13 families], which is used as a handle for knives or other tools.

Latin Terms and Conclusion

The word baculum comes from the Latin, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary lists three definitions of the term: a staff or walking-stick, a lictor's rod, or a sceptre. In rhetoric we have the term argumentum ad baculum to suggest a kind of argument that is based on force and not logic--if you don't do X, you will get your butt kicked...that kind of argument. The baculum is also known as the os penis or os priapi. The female equivalent, for which I couldn't easily find much information, is the baubellum, or os clitoris. Instead of a penile bone, human males just have to rely on hydraulics and on blood pressure in the corpus cavernosum.

But do you see what I have done through this essay? I have gently introduced students to the study of mammals, their orders and families, have done so through the instrument of something that every 16 year-old, male and female, is interested in, and I have, in fact, provided the occasion for an interesting philosophical discussion on why humans don't have bacula. Would it have been a good thing? Does the absence of a bacula, however, make for better "relationships?" I bet we would have the class riveted, and many people would want to go into science as a result--or maybe even Latin--or rhetoric.

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