Scientific Explanation
Some scientists have hypothesized that sexual attraction towards breasts is the result of their function as a secondary sex characteristic. For instance, British zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris theorizes that cleavage is a sexual signal that imitates the image of the cleft between the buttocks, which according to Morris in The Naked Ape is also unique to humans, other primates as a rule having much flatter buttocks.
Evolutionary psychologists theorize that humans' permanently enlarged breasts, in contrast to other primates' breasts, which only enlarge during ovulation, allows females to "solicit male attention and investment even when they are not really fertile".
The reverence and theorizing shown to breasts also appears in the science of modern civilization. Breast fetishism is claimed to be an example of a contagious thought (or meme) spreading throughout society, and that breasts are features that have evolved to influence human sexuality rather than serve an exclusive maternal function.
Read more about this topic: Breast Fetishism
Famous quotes containing the words scientific and/or explanation:
“I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast. It is far easier for a Hitler or a Stalin to find a mock- scientific excuse for persecution than it was for Dominic to find a mock-Christian one.”
—Basil Bunting (1900–1985)
“How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence—I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)