Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Benefits of male circumcision reconfirmed as rates decline [View all]yellowcanine
(35,699 posts)There is a lot of medical literature on circumcision so why not cite that instead of using your "common sense" reasoning? Natural selection is not perfect. Sometimes certain characters can cause problems. Some "customs and traditions" which predate modern medicine have sound health issues behind them. The custom of Jews and Muslims not eating pork, for example. We know today that improperly cooked pork can be a source of illness. This is true of all meats but more so with pork. Primitive people likely noticed that they got sick sometimes when they ate pork. Also they may have noticed that pigs were not very selective in what they ate and thus may have been thought to be less clean and unhealthy. Kosher slaughter of livestock likely had similar roots. Again today we know that slaughter practices can make a big difference in the quality of meat in terms of contamination. The practice of circumcision could have resulted from a similar process starting with observation. We will likely never know but the fact that circumcision was practiced by many unrelated groups around the world would be consistent with such a process. http://www.cirp.org/library/history/dunsmuir1/