yeah, they were so smug about it, too.
“i don’t care mom, i’m an ape”
“and i’m 99.98% an ape and so what?!? stop being so damn cocky. kids today, sheesh.”
(DISCLAIMER THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS)
The way I see it, whatever minimum biological features are necessary for something to qualify as an “ape”, the first creature to satisfy all those criteria would had to have been born from something whose biological features didn’t quite fulfill the minimum “ape” requirements.
So, whatever creature in the past qualifies as the “first ape” really depends on how you define “ape” within this context.
At least, that’s how I understand this, but I could be wrong.
By the way, do you really live in Amsterdam?
If not, mind if you give me a Carmen Sandiego style riddle for the right answer?
i feel like there’s a philosophical, or epistemological issue here regarding the definition of a species, so i don’t think what you describe makes sense, because a) a species is a population not an individual, b) speciation happens over quite a few generations, it’s a fuzzy process, and perhaps most importantly c) the definition of what constitutes a species itself is a whole ball of fuzz which is only useful to the extent we accept that it is an approximation of reality, one that does not map onto reality 1:1.
hmmmm i haven’t played Carmen Sandiego in so many years i don’t really remember what the clues were like, but ok, here goes. there’s a white peacock. there’s an almost total solar eclipse this decade. someone famously wrote something frustratingly incomplete.
So, okay. What we’re running into here is, philosophically, referred to as “the problem of the heap.”
If I see a pile of gravel three feet tall, that’s a heap of gravel. If I see a piece of gravel on the ground, that is not a heap.
If I add a second piece of gravel, that’s two pieces of gravel. If I add a third, that’s three pieces. If I keep adding gravel, eventually I’ll have a heap of gravel. But it’s… Strange, at least, to try and make a precise definition for “how many pieces of gravel does it take to make a heap.” (Or in reverse: “I have a heap of gravel, I take a piece of gravel off, is it still a heap.”)
That’s the sort of definition you get into when you try to mark out whether an animal is or is not an ape. The animal is what it is; “ape” is a useful category we made up to talk about it in the context of other animals that are similar in some ways.
I nearly got my head torn off by one of my coworkers when I worked at Wal-Mart because I stated the scientific fact that humans are animals. She said that I may be an animal, but she wasn’t! And this was a woman well into her 50’s or 60’s at the time.
Yeah, I largely called it the buckle not because of religious fervor(I would say Missouri or Tennessee probably has us beat) but by sheer size. (Dips into an exaggerated Texas drawl) I’m not sure if anybody has told you, but Texas is kind of a Big Place.
That and we still can’t really buy liquor on Sundays due to outdated Blue Laws. When I was in Branson, MO several years ago, I was shocked that I could buy moonshine, on a Sunday, from a Grocery Store! It was right next to the produce section!
I Appreciate You.
In primary school I said something about how they should be ape-bars because people are apes and EVERYONE LAUGHED AT ME because Obviously humans are Monkeys that’s Evolution Stupid.
anyway that was a formative memory for me.
Dang it, not all monkeys have tails! Barbary macaques are tailless.
The separation of simians into “monkeys” and “apes, which are descended from monkeys and much more closely related to Old World monkeys than any Old World monkey is to any New World monkey” is one of my biggest scientific pet peeves.
The last common ancestor of all apes was a monkey. Cladistically speaking – which is the only way of speaking that makes sense for this sort of thing – all apes ARE monkeys. It’s only arrogance that makes us want to say otherwise.
Joe requests an extension on the assignment because his partner is suddenly scarfing bananas and looking into whether she would be allowed to install a tire swing in her room.
Professor Brock grants it, because this isn’t his first rodeo and he actually considers the semester a disappointment if this doesn’t happen to at least a few students.
“We’re going to need an extension. My partner is facing an existential horror for the first time in her life. Yes, first time. It was hard for me to believe that as well.”
The realization is NOT fun. Especially because it comes with severing and rejecting all of the guidance you once relied on, and at times it feels like you can’t turn to anyone in your new, “enlightened” circles because they will have nothing but scorn for the idiot fundie who believed this crap for so long.
Joe’s not responsible for talking Joyce through this, but she very obviously needs SOMEONE to. It’s not something you untangle for 5 minutes before a homework project.
I’m not sure which stage of grief “I’M JUST A MONKEY!” is, could be anger, could be acceptance, but either way she’s going through them pretty quickly.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that what appears to be an eyelid in panels 3 and 4 kinda makes it look like Joe temporarily has two sets of eyebrows
Child abuse, proxy wars, regular wars, land mines, making suicide bombers, letting others starve so one person can have a fancy (car/pool/fingernails).
And yes, we also still fling poo and beat each other to death with our fists.
Oh I don’t dispute that they’re on the list. Cannibalism, battles (maybe wars), murder, and I would guess rape? But to my knowledge at least, they’ve not managed to do anything worse than us. Even if they annihilated a few species, they don’t have us beat for the worst.
I don’t understand why people seem to think chimpanzees wouldn’t do many of these same things if they had the same mental and physical tools to build a civilization and technologically progress. We created wheelchairs and bandages, medicine and lightbulbs. We harnessed fire and wind and the sun itself. This same capacity is also what enabled us to commit genocides and crusades and all sorts of horrible stuff. If another species got to where we are, there’d be variations based on natural instincts and whatnot, but they’d likely have their own virtues and evils on a similar scale.
Actually, given the history of racist comparisons utilizing the word “monkey”, does the phrase, “well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” have a racist etymology? I mean, it’s typically somewhat speciesist at the least, but was/is it racist?
Please accept my apologies for any slight embedded in this. Causing hurt is not my intention.
Some cursory research indicates that no one really knows where the idiom comes from. A few different places (including Wikipedia) claim it started among early twentieth-century creationists mocking evolution, but they don’t have much in the way of citations.
This article cites a newspaper article that uses the phrase “monkey’s uncle” about 12 years before Darwin’s work, and the meaning of the phrase seems to match the modern meaning. Of course, as the article points out, evolution was still a major scientific hypothesis before Darwin figured out its methods, so the phrase could still be a reference to it (or the 1847 article could be etymologically unrelated; it’s entirely possible for two different people to independently decide that having simians in one’s family tree is amusing).
Long story short, I can’t find any evidence to suggest that “monkey’s uncle” came from xenophobic fears about interracial relationships or anything of that nature.
Monkeys are a paraphyletic group anyway, and common vernacular calls apes “monkeys” often enough that it could be taken as an informal term, if you’re not bothered by being overly accurate.
On the other hand, Monkey Master would probably stomp you if you kept calling him a monkey and not an ape.
There are a few birds that have rudimentary tool use and cause-and-effect planning, too. Poking twigs into holes to get bugs to come out, dropping nuts and small prey onto roads and other hard surfaces to crack them open…
And what is the deal with fire anyway? What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go? We’ve been using the stuff for millennia but is anyone asking these questions?
Compared to Becky’s pro-activeness the moment she got here and started hanging out with Dina, this sort of progress feels like putting off opening for months only to suddenly do an all-night cramming session the night before the final. Yes, you’re learning a lot all at once, but it’s mostly because you put off your responsibilities and HAVE to do it all at once.
One of my recent eye-openers with regards to how messy it all is, is that not only is there no singular fish family, there also is no singular tree family. The article I read about that went into the latter had one of the best sub-headlines as it went into detail on this:
Oh I wish daddy trees wood keep it to themselves. My allergies however are in direct response to the seasonal bukkake fest of trees just spooging it out all over the place.
Kind of obvious: growing taller than your competitors is pretty obvious strategy for a plant. Grow tall enough and humans call you a tree.
AIUI true trees, meaning secondary growth rings producing bark and trunk wood, are ancestral to conifers and angiosperms; first flowering plant was a tree. Within the flowers, the ancestral monocot lost tree-nature; naturally many different monocots have re-evolved tree-like life, such as palm trees. Which are tall and very skinny, because they don’t have secondary growth, they just grow up, not out.
Tree-like life was invented before trees, like lycophytes and fern trees. Yay convergent evolution.
i mean, taxonomy is messy af, but i don’t feel like convergent evolution (of the crab-like body plan, of trees, or of flight for that matter) is an instance of that. those are in most cases, unambiguously different groups converging. taxonomists are not fooled, it’s the rest of us who find it confusing. (i heard someone recently saying that birds were descended from pterosaurs. haha! nope! but i can see how that mistake happened.)
Why would they need to consult other crab families? Is it some kind of mafia deal? I don’t think the animal kingdom (outside humans) is overly concerned with intellectual property rights…
honestly, citation needed for how weird carcinization is.
until proven otherwise, my take is this is a marginally interesting phenomenon within crustacean biology that got blown way out of proportion when XKCD made a joke about it. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=carcinization
Of course this isn’t the first time he’s influenced people or popularized an idea. Nor I am sure, his last. The popularity of the circumlittoral zone in oceanography may also be evidence, but at present google doesn’t “have enough data”.
Also, why do Canadians and New Zealanders in particular have such a fascination with crab-ifying?
Oh indeed. But if we didn’t take the comically weird seriously, then how could we stand to be so seriously weird about comics?
As someone who is well documented as missing the punchline with a serious reply, I would like to thank you for your contribution at granting new members to the club.
Several species of macaque have been demonstrated to use tools, as have capuchins, mandrills, and baboons. The lattermost were even cited by Darwin as example of tool-using primates, so “monkeys can’t use tools” can’t even be blamed on being an outdated concept.
Apes use tools. Monkeys use tools. Sea otters use tools – rocks kept in pouches under their forelegs, used to crack shells. Corvids use tools.
Intriguingly, apes, monkeys, and corvids have all been seen to shape tools as well – stripping a branch of its twigs and leaves to better poke termites out of a nest, for instance.
See, this is a little bit of a hot-button semantic issue for some biologists, who insist that you shouldn’t define a category of animal “polyphyletically,” i.e., in a way that excludes some animals with the same most recent common ancestor. I think it’s silly, but what do I know? But by that standard, apes are a large subset of monkeys, since they’re more closely related to the old-world monkeys than the new-world monkeys are. (And of course, humans are a kind of ape, since we’re more closely related to chimps and bonobos than any other ape is.) I think it’s silly, but what do I know? (Also, by this standard whales are fish… as are humans.)
Regardless, “if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey” wouldn’t be right either way, since Barbary macaques don’t have tails, but they’re certainly not apes.
Actually both for taxonomy, and for some types of classy insults, that actually makes a lot of sense. Obsessively stipulating it and religiously demanding it be faithfully adhered to is silly, but the core philosophy makes sense.
I know this is classwork-related, but it still is nice she can just openly unpack this with Joe, especially considering Sarah knows, but most of her friends do not.
I still can’t figure out if that was the flaw in the Brain’s planning, or an intentional decision to prolong the thrill of the attempt. The plan was never “to take over the world” rather “to try to take over the world.”
This is one of those perspectives I never get.
“Oh No! I am not made to be an inferior version of a being I don’t understand, instead I am one of the smartest living things ever, the product of billions of years of natural processes converging on this point in time!”
The second thing sounds cooler.
^This. Like, I had a lot of pent up negative feelings regarding a supposedly all-good, all-powerful literally inventing the concept of pain and how I was supposed to feel grateful that my miserable existence was “gifted” to me… But somehow the mere idea of having absolutely no Big Plan, no Divine Purpose for my life, was still harder to swallow? Indoctrination is a helluva drug.
The trick is to spend some time in the ‘I am smarter than all these ‘reflections of a divine being’ who haven’t worked it out yet’ space, then relearn how being a nice person works.
Which is why /r/atheism is (presumably) filled with the worst sort of neckbearded manchildren.
On the other hand, if you were a super-advanced, superior version of something (not that that’s quite the situation, but kind of), wouldn’t you rather be a super-advanced superior cat or crow or dolphin or somesuch?
There’s a lot of really cool animals out there, but primates are kind of… Well, silly. If you’re a pale shadow of the divine, well, you’re kind of stuck with it; you’d be insulting God if you said, “Wait, can’t I be a really smart and cool cat instead?”. But if it’s just that, objectively, there’s not really a realistic way for a super-advanced, superior cat to develop tool usage or societies on a human scale… Well, that just makes you think out on the opportunities we missed out on just because there wasn’t a proper intermediary stage.
(No, no, that has absolutely nothing with Joyce’s reaction here. But when you think about it more deeply… Humans would be way cooler if we were designed as something better than we are.)
I just learned about selfish genetics, most of our DNA is parasitic!
We are weighed down by 4 billion years of evolutionary duct tape repairs, and half our genes exist because they kill the cell their in if the cell doesn’t have enough copies it them.
Thank science we’re on the cusp of controlling them.
Actually we can control them and its rapidly getting easier. On the other hand, as of yet, we mostly have little idea of what we are doing.
Seriously, you can pay money to have DNA designed and manufactured however you want for gene splicing, fairly cheaply at serious hobby level type of expense, and unless you are messing with biological warfare, nobody cares. The trick is designing genes that actually do something interesting.
Well, yes, but I want pet dinosaurs and kraken and smart horses with single horns and air-whales that produce and trap hydrogen to navigate the skies. I want designer viruses to go in and de-age my cells back, to around 30. I want plants and animals that can survive on Mars and bacteria to start transforming the atmosphere of Venus.
For glowing in the dark, we don’t have to design from scratch. The hack to improve photosynthesis was actually pretty interesting. But mostly, we really don’t know what we’re doing, and the difficulty of predicting protein folding is only part of the problem.
I sure hope we can de-age cells in coming decades. At least then I’ll have options other then pouring my brain into a quantum computer.
A Hydrogen powered blimp-like whale that can fly would be just barely possible.
Unless you want a Jurassic Park style theme park monster, I’m afraid we’ll never have true dinosaurs as pets.
As for the kraken, there’s actually a limit to how big a multicellular organism can get before homeostasis becomes nigh impossible with typical ATP-powered cells. If it’s just a tetraploid giant squid, it shouldn’t be that hard.
Well, I’m not picky about true dinosaurs. I’ll accept a backwards engineered chicken as long as it is both cute and looks like a dinosaur ought to look.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but given that squids tend to seek out heat and/or electromagnetic signals to hunt their prey, they may very well be inclined to attack ships, anyway.
Awww. Chickens *ARE* true dinosaurs. Don’t be mean to the little baby with the monster face. They only used genetic engineering to unlock some latent code that had been overridden by the beak addition. No frog dna, no amber mosquitoes. It was inside the chicken all along.
Personally I think KFC should do a sponsorship mash-up with the final Jurrasic World and start selling KFD. Unfortunately it /is/ Kentucky, so something tells me that ain’t gonna happen.
Not that I don’t think you couldn’t handle AT LEAST one the size of a chicken; there’s literally no DNA intact from any dinosaur remains to date which we can use for the cloning process.
Now, if backwards time travel or at least something that lets us see back in time is possible…..
It’s worse than that. It’s not just that she isn’t made in the image of a higher being, it’s that she’s made in the image of a lower one.
I think the key to understanding this perspective is realizing that it’s rooted in denigration of animals. For example, they’ll often say that humans having souls means that we’re capable of higher emotions, and that animals like, say, dogs can’t feel love, guilt, loyalty, or compassion.
(Look, this stuff isn’t made up by people who need to base their beliefs in facts, all right?)
Joyce is discovering that by and large she isn’t better than a dog. Which is fine if you see dogs as loving animals that we adopt into our families, but terrible if you’ve spent your entire life treating the word dog as an insult.
*cute a bunch of comments from cat-lovers in 3… 2…*
Risin’ ape! back on the streets!
Did my time, learnt my bible!
Went the distance, now i’m ditching the creed,
Just a girl, deprogramming her mind!
So many times it happens too fast,
you trade your reason for dogma!
Unclench your grip on the yarns of the past
You must fight your way out of those lies!
“I an made to be an inferior being of a thing” is not how religion takes it. You are also immortal and the natal stage of a divine being. Buddhism and Abrahamic Religion makes it clear you’re the big dogs of the universe.
Except much of Christianity, particularly the Evangelical variety that Joyce was evidently raised with, holds that humans are sinful failures; God is ashamed of us, has already tried to wipe us out once, and our best hope is to suck up to Him enough that when He does it again, He takes the suck-ups to Heaven with him. We’re not seen as the “natal” form of anything – they don’t believe in change like that, remember?
No, according to those types, the way God shows His favor isn’t by making you a better person, it’s by making you rich. Forget all that stuff in the Bible about how it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, or giving away all your goods to follow Jesus, or any of that – God awards cash prizes, bay-bee! So if you’re poor, they shouldn’t offer you the help you need, because poverty means God hates you, right?
(NOTE: This is not the stance of Christianity in general, although to hear Evangelicals talk, you’d think that it was.)
This bothers me so much… I was raised Catholic and the general idea was that, yes we are sinful creatures but God still loves us and wants us to improve and become better people.
And the whole prosperity gospel makes me want to flip tables…
In theory it’s about how the good and faithful will be rewarded in this life, so you should be good and you will see those rewards. It’s not entirely unlike the whole Flood/Sodam/Gomorrah bit you mention below – or how Israel is always said to prosper or be punished based on how faithful the people are. So, it’s not really unBiblical and it would even be that bad of a philosophy, except for one small problem.
It has no relation to reality. We can clearly see that the good are not rewarded and the wicked punished, but trying to reconcile the theology to reality leads not only to seeing the rich as virtuous and not needing to help the poor, but if your poor to seeing that as a moral failing in yourself.
That is a very good point, The people who came up with this whole thing just simply forgot the very important part about NOT focusing on material possessions and success in this life.
You could say that promising rewards in the afterlife is even more of a scam. At least it’s possible to judge the Prosperity Gospel and realize those with the rewards aren’t morally superior to those without.
There’s no way to see if anyone gets rewarded or punished after this life.
Well, to be precise, being all powerful, if yahweh was trying to wipe us out we’d’ve been done. My understanding of the text is yahweh was more doing a ‘soft reboot’.
Pretty much, The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah. It was all because humans became too wicked and evil so God picked the few left who were kinda okay and erased the rest.
If you think that’s messed up, in Numbers 31, Moses commands the soldiers of the Israelite army to kill every man and woman of the Midianite tribe, and to keep the virgin girls for themselves as sexual stock.
Dead serious.
This was from the same guy who wrote the Ten Commandments.
“natal step of a divine being” isn’t even really that common in Christianity. Some various level of “pinnacle of creation” or “chosen people” is common to the Abrahamic religions though. That may be broad enough to just reflect common human perspective though.
Apart from my trash goblin shipping going on, I think Joe is a really good character for Joyce to have this conversation with, both in and out of universe.
‘Cause in-universe she’d have Dorothy and Becky who would both have A Reaction to this. Dorothy would try to be gently reassuring and talk Joyce out of her funk when what Joyce wants to do right now is scream and flail her arms and run around in circles. A rational answer isn’t what she needs, she needs to experience the problem before she can figure out what it means and pull herself out of it. Becky I honestly do think would get weird and maybe a little judgmental about it. Not in such a way that it would indicate that Becky doesn’t love her a whole dang lot, but I don’t think that conversation is gonna go smoothly.
Out of universe this is good because if you want this problem solved you go to Dorothy. If you want this problem to become hilarious you go to Joe.
Sarah already knows and I get the feeling with her it’s more like “it’s fine, just drop it.”
You know how Danny started dancing around his sexuality with Joe so Joe bluntly asked him if he was gay, because Joe wasn’t interested in talking about feelings and instead thought the solution would be to just find the empirical answer to Danny’s question? That Danny wanting to talk about it and express himself was secondary to just getting to the answer?
I kind of think, with something like this, Sarah is like that. Sarah would want Joyce to get to the answer instead of feeling it, since she only really knows how to show she cares insweeping, dramatic actions.
Actually speaking of Sarah, I just realized that she told Booster she was going to be giddy about Joyce going to biology class and referring to her as a fundie… except Sarah already knew Joyce had given up her faith. I am now even more convinced that Sarah was just actually in a good mood that day and came up with some bullshit to justify why it was abnormal.
Joe straddles a really precarious line of acknowledging and engaging with Joyce without lionizing or catastrophizing her circumstances. He’s there, he has a snarky line, but more importantly Joyce has to have the opportunity to flip her lid.
And when she’s ready to un-flip out, Joe’s snarky line is there to banter off of.
Seriously I don’t actually want to get together any time soon, eventually the rule of drama will dictate they have Serious Problems or a breakup and I want them to get married and have a domestic hijinks spinoff strip where they fight aliens and robot monkeys.
Part of me really wants Becky to walk in during this talk and to have heard at least some of this, I mean she just screamed that last part. It would probably remove a lot of anxiety/stress if it was just out that she wasnt a super christian anymore, I mean Becky has excepted Science over the bible already.
If Becky doesn’t find out by accident, Joyce really is going to have to figure out a way to tell her before participating in class gives away the secret
I mean, I feel like you can still believe in a god, and still follow science and evolution and crap, so long as you presume that said god is responsible for said science. It’s essentially impossible to define what that creator deity would be, however, and that may fall further into the realms of philosophy than theology. I’m agnostic for the record.
Of course it’s possible, but it’s not really possible when you took the bible literally, as Joyce did. Sometimes, when you’ve been so thoroughly bullshitted and you start questioning, one more thing just….shatters the foundation and there’s nothing left. Joyce’s faith is like that, I think. It broke before it bent.
The divine watchmaker theory was popular for a reason.
Agnosticish who offers the occasional praise unto Anoia, myself. Inasmuch as I believe in any deities, I take a pretty Pratchettian view there. Also, my upbringing wasn’t nearly as authoritarianly religious as Joyce’s or Willis’s – my religious parent does in fact believe in evolution, for one, and the other’s been an atheist my whole life – but I’d absorbed enough Toxic Religiosity through osmosis that I came to a similar ‘wait. I don’t have belief, I just have fear of punishment. That’s not a good basis for being a member of a religion’ thought process when I was thirteen or so. (Religious parent is also from an Anabaptist church, a fact which I’m thankful for since it meant critically examining my beliefs on some level.) I figure any gods that exist and are worth worshipping would have noticed the compulsive anxiety-prayers and agreed this is way healthier on the whole.
I think part of the issue is that Joyce has never been exposed to any scientist who has any sort of religious beliefs or alternative views of religions other than fundamentalist Christianity. Liberal Christianity like Jacob and Becky’s offends her actually as the idea of religious error or metaphor.
Speaking as a neuroatypical person, I think she’d hate anything that was metaphorical in religion so that would really lock out a lot of them.
You certainly can and many people do. That’s broadly the most common Christian approach. It’s Catholic doctrine and common in mainline Protestantism as well.
That’s just not the faith Joyce (or Willis) grew up in.
See, Joe, THIS is why it’s not a thirty second assignment and you literally should have started the SECOND class got out after receiving it. *facepalm*
The Bible says simply, “God created heaven and earth.” It doesn’t go into details. If He wanted to just snap His fingers and magick it into being, OK; if he wanted to make it a long, drawn-out process and do it using ‘SCIENCE!'</i‘, then that’s fine too.
Since when are we puny humans, despite our supposedly-developed brains, able to figure out things like that? We just ain’t that smart … and I offer as proof the fact that almost half the people who allegedly have brains voted for Trump in the last election!!
For the same reason Frodo didn’t just hitch a ride on an eagle to get to Mount Doom: short, boring story. In the beginning, there was no TV, so the creator had to invent something to watch, and imperfect humans are way more entertaining than an endless screensaver of fish or whatever.
What you’re proposing is theistic evolution. It’s an incredibly weird and unintuitive way to make humans, though, or anything else – evolution has built us all in a super kludgey way.
It also says Heaven and Earth were created in six days. Biblical Literalists don’t do sliding-timescale – they believe it was six literal 24-hour days, as in the work started at 9am on Thursday, October 4, 4004 BC, and finished up at 6pm on Tuesday, October 9, 4004 BC.
(That ties into Millennialist thinking too – you can neatly divide history into 2000 years from Creation to Moses, 2000 years from Moses to Christ, and 2000 years from Christ to the Apocalypse. Don’t look at me, but somehow it all makes sense to them.)
Which does apparently tie into ancient Jewish creation of those timescales, almost all of which were invented after the fact by various editors and authors of the Hebrew Bible, to fit into meaningful cosmic timelines. 4000 years from creation to the Second Temple, with the Exodus occurring 2/3rds of the way through.
Someone should put together a decent book that covers all the stupid shit that creationists believe. It could be specifically marketed to those who break free of the bullshit and want the truth.
Well, it’s not as condensed as one book would be (and considering the subject, I suppose that’s a pipe dream) but ncib has a reading list – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230199/
this poor boy. like, every interaction he has with Growing Joyce makes me think of that bit in the Gym with Jordan talking about how she’s a weirdo freak but she keeps going and one day will be perfect
He was a gifted communicator. I think he used mystic-sounding language as a tool to communicate that awe to the average person in a way they could relate to.
The level of trust Joyce is showing Joe here is impressive, she knows the reputation of Joe is a horndog yet she, stubbornly, pushed on through and has gained a confidant, a horny male confidant even
These two are made for each other, I just wonder how long it’ll take for them both to realise it
Joe’s attraction to Joyce is a plot thread that runs way back, almost to the beginning of the comic. Early on in his horndog “do” list days it was just physical, but it’s at a deeper level now (as his conversation with Jacob demonstrates).
But a somewhat special monkey that evolved (over millions of years) a number of traits (that exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom in various combinations) that allowed us to get to where we are today in a relatively short amount of time.
I want to give Joyce the biggest hug, and tell her that the absence of God plus the existence of life (even more, conscious life!) is way way more special than some higher being snapping their fingers for it.
The sheer accident of carbon-based life, surviving eons of hostile conditions, evolving from a soup of aminoacids over million of years ’till it can do science , questioning and observing the universe it inhabits? That’s a precious thing. That does makes us special, even if in the bigger picture we’re barely a wisp of atoms floating in our local supercluster, and sending messages in a bottle.
That’s so so cool! What’s your speciality? 😀 Looks like a physicist according to some comments?
I’m a wannabe-writer who tried to major in Philosophy, then in Anthropology, then dropped out to be a cook and gather as much knowledge as I could have (with the hopes of one day indeed write). So everything interests me – I admire actual scientists a lot.
I’ve never heard of eating meat being described as a “religion”, and this is coming from someone with four vegetarian sisters (three of whom are vegan).
From what I’ve heard, it’s kind of like Norse religion, where animals keep getting reincarnated until they have their flesh prepared and eaten by humans, after which they get to go somewhere that more or less resembles Nirvana or Valhalla or something.
Faith is a complicated thing. It’s like being in love – You feel it or you don’t, and if you do feel it, keeping up with it is an involved process. I lost my capacity for it many years ago but there’s still a lot to be awed by in this world of ours :3
Frankly, I think it depends on how you view God as the universe as a self-organizing system is hardly something to be dismissed as. Frankly, conciosuness existing is pretty much the nature of the divine as itself as it is an ecosystem developing consciousness for the purposes of describing meaning to reality and that is beautiful.
Pantheists believe the universe is divine and the divine is the universe.
I’ve got no beef with that, there’s a ton of physicists that go back into believing precisely because of this apparent self-organized system. I postulate that we don’t know enough to affirm whether our observations are final (which is also beautiful to me! We keep trying!) and therefore subjecting the universe to this much of an order – Even the speed of light makes exceptions for gravity, and its value was something we thought couldn’t be surpassed.
Pantheism is chill because the universe itself being the divine would make sense to me as an idea of God. Giordano Bruno was a cool dude. My atheism is due to my utter inability to feel faith in anything other than human beings (an irrational belief that gets tested every day AND YET), but even I gaze at the starry sky to be overcome by feeling #Infinity.
It does in General Relativity-based hypotheses. My mistake was only presenting it as an already-proven fact instead of a plausibility still being tested, but hey! Poetry ^^;;
Black holes would be one of these instances. There’s a recent discovery of one whose jet launches particles at 99% of the speed of light, and we literally can’t know what’s past the Event Horizon of supermassive black holes, because it breaks the laws of physics as we know them.
There’s also some instances of Neutrinos observed as being able to surpass the speed of light, and while they’ve been deemed a mistake in measuring due to technical limitations, the idea hasn’t been completely ruled out. Additionally, there’s a theoretical particle called Tachyon (much loved by sci-fi writers), which also works in some models and not others.
As others have said. Beautiful. Joyce deserves to realize we didn’t come from nothing. Even the tree of life comes from molecules which come from atoms descended from stars made of other atoms (iterate a bit here brother) coalesced from particles made of bits made of energy. Only that is something of whose origin we don’t yet understand. But that’s ok, because there is beauty around us that we are lucky enough to get to perceive while we are here. The universe is as full of why, without god, as it with it. But without god we are blessed with the tools and the volition to answer why, and to know that this is our only chance to be good to each other.
Right back at you ;AAA; The sight set on the future is only one part of being amazed by the universe – Presently we already experience beauty, and our understanding of science only enhances it further.
We don’t know all the answers, and it’s likely we as a species won’t ever have them all, but the fact we make questions, tell stories, and help each other… That’s incredible. The journey is the destination on itself ;www;
I mean, believing in evolution or the age of the universe or whatever doesn’t even have to conflict with having religious belief; heck, Georges Lemaître who devised the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic Priest after all.
Indeed, Stephen Hawking was unable to figure out how there could be a Big Bang unless it just didn’t happen (“there must have been a bunch of stuff beforehand so life didn’t emerge from nothing”) and that wasn’t what the math said too.
Not that it made him religious, Vatican paid for vacations aside. 🙂
Arthur Penrose had the view reality was informational in nature which is that matter doesn’t exist but is literally mathematics sculpted like computer code from quantum waves.
No, Joyce. You’re not a monkey. 😛 You’re still clinging to the false belief that evolution is a linear progression from “least evolved to most evolved”. What you need to realize is that monkeys (as well as dogs, cats, snakes, spiders, plants and mushrooms) are JUST as advanced as humans are; it’s just that their evolutionary strengths went along a different path to ours.
Wait a second. The Old World monkeys are more closely related to us than the New World monkeys. We have a common ancestor with the Old World monkeys that was not also an ancestor of the New World monkeys. So, if the term “monkey” is to have any useful meaning, we are monkeys, too.
Me and my monkey, with a dream and a gun
I’m hoping my monkey don’t point that gun at anyone
Me and my monkey, like Butch and the Sundance Kid
Trying to understand why [b]s[/b]he did what [b]s[/b]he did
Why [b]s[/b]he did what [b]s[/b]he did
Ah, I sympathise (though for me it was not the realization of my mundane origins but that of the finality of my death that sent me spiraling for a few months.)
Truth be told, there is absolutely no way to know what lay in death, the Final Unknown. For all we know, whatever journey awaits in death (provided there is one), could be more bizarre than anything humans could ever conceive of. But that just adds to the wild adventure that is all existence!
“When you get right down to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago. No different. Our DNA hasn’t changed substantially in a hundred thousand years. We’re still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we’ve evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.”
Joyce is also completely wrong. Life after all emerges from systems that have been developed by complex physics that are extremely fine for the development of life and adaptational.
Most theoretical physicists would go, “Life emerged from math.”
Mind you, if Joyce found out about String Theory, it would break her brain. Because in some universe, not only is God real but the Soggies. Which of course we know is true in her fictional reality.
The hierarchy of the sciences (with apologies to Comte):
Philosophy answers to Sociology
Sociology answers to Psychology
Psychology answers to Biology
Biology answers to Chemistry
Chemistry answers to Physics
Physics answers to Mathematics
Mathematics answers to God…
and God answers to Philosophy
Theoretical Physics is the best thing in academia! Its the only field where you can make utterly ridiculous fantasy and be considered a valid theory other than economics.
Seriously, I’d I took a drink every time a reporter misinterpreted theoretical physics, I’d get blackout drunk in no time flat.
…not that I’d ever do that, but you get the point.
Even discoveries in astronomy are often erroneously misconstrued in the media. If any said discovery includes figures of millions or billions, the two are confused 50% of the time when they’re reported in popular media. And I’m HARDLY exaggerating.
The only real disagreement I have with Joyce is that she’s not “just” a monkey. Nor, for that matter, is there anything “just” about monkeys. Monkeys are cool.
is it too late to ask for more time?
Reason: half of the pair is wrapping their head around evolution and we are still im the “I’M JUST A MONKEY” phase.
im sure its a common excuse.
I take a weird comfort in my primate family. Every once in a while I’ll do something, like hook my fingertips around a tree branch to pull it closer to access some fruit, and think “my distant ancestors did this. We’re all really just smart apes”
I actually do want them to get together… They actually understand each other really well, and if they could both learn to open up and be vulnerable with each other they would make a great couple. Maybe.
Humans are primates, but not monkeys. Both humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor that was a more basal primate, NOT a monkey.
I return to my lesson on evolution, one modern animal did not evolve from nor will it evolve into another modern animal. A mudskipper will never become a salamander, even if the species loses its gills, its fins become legs, and it takes to an entirely land based lifestyle, that will NOT be a salamander, or even an amphibian, because that’s a totally different evolutionary line.
I’m rather comfortable with being a fish-landreptilelikethingamal-mammal-primate-monkey-bigape-sapien. Really the only part that bugs me is the use of great or greater to mean big, since it carries the connotation of ‘better’ even if that were not intended.
Now if we were called Grate Apes cuz of how much we’re bugging our housemates, THAT would make sense.
It’s a little more complicated than that, since there real is no thing that is “monkeys”. There are two groups considered monkeys – Old World and New World monkeys. We share a common ancestor with Old World Monkeys that’s much closer than our joint common ancestor with New World Monkeys. There’s no monophyletic grouping that includes both kinds of monkeys but that doesn’t include us. That’s how we can argue that humans are monkeys.
As for the other point – it is at least possible for one modern animal to evolve from another extant modern animal. A sub group can branch off to form a new species while the original species remains essentially unchanged. That’s obviously not the case with us and monkeys of course, but then monkeys aren’t a species, but a group of related species. Modern monkey species evolved from older common ancestors that were also monkeys – though eventually you get to the first monkey species and then back to non-monkey primates.
Much like humans did evolve from apes, despite there still being apes around. We didn’t evolve from chimpanzees or gorillas, our closest ape relatives, but from common ancestors who were still apes.
The whole “I’m just a monkey?!” Victorian mindset is where this whole mess begins, and the non-debate started when it lingered with people who wanted to believe being part of a unicorn rather than a goat makes a difference when they are the tail of the beast either way…
Whether Joyce’s parents’ ancestors way back in the Middle Ages were royalty or prostitutes doesn’t change who the present day Browns turned out to be. How much or how little operatic flair there was in the origins of homo sapiens won’t change our baffling schnozz.
At this point it really doesn’t matter ape/monkey. Someday she’ll say “I’m a primate” and later “I’m a fish” but that’s not the big painful part for her.
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Joe: “Look! A three-headed monkey!”
Joyce: “ARRRRRRR!!!”
Joe: “Look at you! You’ve got anxiety!”
Actually, an ape. Monkeys have tails (unless Joyce is REALLY hiding something)
Yep. People are a type of animal. The type of animal is mammal. The type of mammal is clearly ape. We didn’t descend from apes; we are a kind of ape.
Our early human ancestors still counted as apes. The first ape, however, was born from a primate that wasn’t quite an ape.
yeah, they were so smug about it, too.
“i don’t care mom, i’m an ape”
“and i’m 99.98% an ape and so what?!? stop being so damn cocky. kids today, sheesh.”
(DISCLAIMER THIS IS A JOKE THIS IS NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS)
No, that is not how biology works.
Clearly, the mom bent her big toe so much that her kids came out with their big toes twisted around. THAT’S how biology works!
(You can laugh, but Lamarckian evolution was a thing for a while.)
(it’s not how biology works in that there is no single “first ape”. that’s not the order of precision that paleontology operates on)
The way I see it, whatever minimum biological features are necessary for something to qualify as an “ape”, the first creature to satisfy all those criteria would had to have been born from something whose biological features didn’t quite fulfill the minimum “ape” requirements.
So, whatever creature in the past qualifies as the “first ape” really depends on how you define “ape” within this context.
At least, that’s how I understand this, but I could be wrong.
By the way, do you really live in Amsterdam?
If not, mind if you give me a Carmen Sandiego style riddle for the right answer?
i feel like there’s a philosophical, or epistemological issue here regarding the definition of a species, so i don’t think what you describe makes sense, because a) a species is a population not an individual, b) speciation happens over quite a few generations, it’s a fuzzy process, and perhaps most importantly c) the definition of what constitutes a species itself is a whole ball of fuzz which is only useful to the extent we accept that it is an approximation of reality, one that does not map onto reality 1:1.
hmmmm i haven’t played Carmen Sandiego in so many years i don’t really remember what the clues were like, but ok, here goes. there’s a white peacock. there’s an almost total solar eclipse this decade. someone famously wrote something frustratingly incomplete.
Is it Spain?
nope =)
All I know for sure so far is that you live in Europe.
Not that there’s anything wrong, but recreational use of cannabis isn’t technically legal where you are, is it?
nope!
Wagstaff:
So, okay. What we’re running into here is, philosophically, referred to as “the problem of the heap.”
If I see a pile of gravel three feet tall, that’s a heap of gravel. If I see a piece of gravel on the ground, that is not a heap.
If I add a second piece of gravel, that’s two pieces of gravel. If I add a third, that’s three pieces. If I keep adding gravel, eventually I’ll have a heap of gravel. But it’s… Strange, at least, to try and make a precise definition for “how many pieces of gravel does it take to make a heap.” (Or in reverse: “I have a heap of gravel, I take a piece of gravel off, is it still a heap.”)
That’s the sort of definition you get into when you try to mark out whether an animal is or is not an ape. The animal is what it is; “ape” is a useful category we made up to talk about it in the context of other animals that are similar in some ways.
I nearly got my head torn off by one of my coworkers when I worked at Wal-Mart because I stated the scientific fact that humans are animals. She said that I may be an animal, but she wasn’t! And this was a woman well into her 50’s or 60’s at the time.
Well, there are other realms she could belong to. Let her self-identify.
You don’t by any chance happen to live in the US Bible Belt, do you?
More like the Bible Belt Buckle. Texas.
I don’t know about that. From what I’ve heard, Tennessee and Southern Ohio are much more intense candidates for the buckle.
Fun fact: wherever in the US the atheist blogger PZ Myers goes, people tell him that’s the buckle of the Bible Belt.
Yeah, I largely called it the buckle not because of religious fervor(I would say Missouri or Tennessee probably has us beat) but by sheer size. (Dips into an exaggerated Texas drawl) I’m not sure if anybody has told you, but Texas is kind of a Big Place.
That and we still can’t really buy liquor on Sundays due to outdated Blue Laws. When I was in Branson, MO several years ago, I was shocked that I could buy moonshine, on a Sunday, from a Grocery Store! It was right next to the produce section!
Well, she’s clearly not a protist or bacterium, so that leaves plant or fungus.
Fungi can be really fun guys…
I Appreciate You.
In primary school I said something about how they should be ape-bars because people are apes and EVERYONE LAUGHED AT ME because Obviously humans are Monkeys that’s Evolution Stupid.
anyway that was a formative memory for me.
Could be worse. In middle school the teacher asked everyone in class who believe in evolution to raise their hands, I was the only one who did.
Were Willis and Joyce allowed to watch this?
https://youtu.be/–szrOHtR6U
I knew what that video was going to be before I clicked it!
Dang it, not all monkeys have tails! Barbary macaques are tailless.
The separation of simians into “monkeys” and “apes, which are descended from monkeys and much more closely related to Old World monkeys than any Old World monkey is to any New World monkey” is one of my biggest scientific pet peeves.
The last common ancestor of all apes was a monkey. Cladistically speaking – which is the only way of speaking that makes sense for this sort of thing – all apes ARE monkeys. It’s only arrogance that makes us want to say otherwise.
Humans are monkeys.
Humans are lobe-finned fish!
Don’t be silly, fish don’t exist!
I do so love “There’s No Such Thing As A Fish”.
Joyce will clearly turn out to be Saiyan.
I think its a nested hierarchy thing
All apes are monkeys but not all monkeys are apes
Reject religion. Become monke
monkefication achieved
Dina strolls by as her dino-of-the-day, they accidentally recreate a Godzilla vs Kong ‘monke’ meme.
Joe requests an extension on the assignment because his partner is suddenly scarfing bananas and looking into whether she would be allowed to install a tire swing in her room.
Professor Brock grants it, because this isn’t his first rodeo and he actually considers the semester a disappointment if this doesn’t happen to at least a few students.
I was hoping that “this” would be the Reverend Ernest Matthews after he ate the banana.
“We’re going to need an extension. My partner is facing an existential horror for the first time in her life. Yes, first time. It was hard for me to believe that as well.”
Huh, you know, this does make me feel bad for people raised creationist.
The realization is NOT fun. Especially because it comes with severing and rejecting all of the guidance you once relied on, and at times it feels like you can’t turn to anyone in your new, “enlightened” circles because they will have nothing but scorn for the idiot fundie who believed this crap for so long.
Joe’s not responsible for talking Joyce through this, but she very obviously needs SOMEONE to. It’s not something you untangle for 5 minutes before a homework project.
The role of Monkey Master will now be played by Joyce Brown.
(Only in the Canadian dub, though. Everyone else gets Kelsey Grammer.)
I thought it was the guy that voiced KITT who did MM… The blooper reel was hysterical when the scripts for Knight Rider were read over MM dialogue.
I dunno about Joe, but I’m both amused and impressed by this progress
I’m not sure which stage of grief “I’M JUST A MONKEY!” is, could be anger, could be acceptance, but either way she’s going through them pretty quickly.
Also, I feel compelled to point out that what appears to be an eyelid in panels 3 and 4 kinda makes it look like Joe temporarily has two sets of eyebrows
Not quite as funny a title as ‘the Euphoria is in my pants’ but probably a more appropriate one
As someone who works with monkeys, gotta say, some days we’re worse than monkeys.
Though not as bad as chimpanzees.
They are the motherfucking worst.
Child abuse, proxy wars, regular wars, land mines, making suicide bombers, letting others starve so one person can have a fancy (car/pool/fingernails).
And yes, we also still fling poo and beat each other to death with our fists.
True, chimps don’t build explosives or have cars or pools.
Other than that, though, they’re on the list too. Relatives – whatcha gonna do?
Oh I don’t dispute that they’re on the list. Cannibalism, battles (maybe wars), murder, and I would guess rape? But to my knowledge at least, they’ve not managed to do anything worse than us. Even if they annihilated a few species, they don’t have us beat for the worst.
I don’t understand why people seem to think chimpanzees wouldn’t do many of these same things if they had the same mental and physical tools to build a civilization and technologically progress. We created wheelchairs and bandages, medicine and lightbulbs. We harnessed fire and wind and the sun itself. This same capacity is also what enabled us to commit genocides and crusades and all sorts of horrible stuff. If another species got to where we are, there’d be variations based on natural instincts and whatnot, but they’d likely have their own virtues and evils on a similar scale.
Bonobos are pretty cool though.
Technically, some days we’re worse than the OTHER monkeys. Every troop has its problem members.
Genetically speaking, we’re a monkey’s cousin.
Wouldn’t that make males a monkey’s uncle?
Is YOUR uncle also your brother?
Am I my brother’s monkey?
The question is frequently mistranslated .
I am your monkey’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate
Ooh! Ooh! EEK EEK EEK EEK EEK!
What does that make us?
Absolutely bananas
Monkey alone weak…
…Monkeys together strong.
Monkeys need bath
Ha!!! I literally laughed. Well done!
[Warning: Possibly Racially Insensitive]
Actually, given the history of racist comparisons utilizing the word “monkey”, does the phrase, “well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” have a racist etymology? I mean, it’s typically somewhat speciesist at the least, but was/is it racist?
Please accept my apologies for any slight embedded in this. Causing hurt is not my intention.
Some cursory research indicates that no one really knows where the idiom comes from. A few different places (including Wikipedia) claim it started among early twentieth-century creationists mocking evolution, but they don’t have much in the way of citations.
This article cites a newspaper article that uses the phrase “monkey’s uncle” about 12 years before Darwin’s work, and the meaning of the phrase seems to match the modern meaning. Of course, as the article points out, evolution was still a major scientific hypothesis before Darwin figured out its methods, so the phrase could still be a reference to it (or the 1847 article could be etymologically unrelated; it’s entirely possible for two different people to independently decide that having simians in one’s family tree is amusing).
Long story short, I can’t find any evidence to suggest that “monkey’s uncle” came from xenophobic fears about interracial relationships or anything of that nature.
That’s cool! Thank you for your scholarly efforts.
Actually we’re Great Apes. Common mistake though. Anyone could have made it.
Monkeys are a paraphyletic group anyway, and common vernacular calls apes “monkeys” often enough that it could be taken as an informal term, if you’re not bothered by being overly accurate.
On the other hand, Monkey Master would probably stomp you if you kept calling him a monkey and not an ape.
One of the hugest things that proves we’re not monkeys: we don’t have tails. Also, apes will show at least some basic form of using tools.
As do numerous species of monkey. 😛
There are a few birds that have rudimentary tool use and cause-and-effect planning, too. Poking twigs into holes to get bugs to come out, dropping nuts and small prey onto roads and other hard surfaces to crack them open…
Impaling poisonous prey for a few days so the toxins in their blood break down and/or leak out…
Shrikes are metal as hell, man.
Some people have tails, they are usually surgically removed at birth.
Also Monkey as an informal way of referring to Primates in general is a fairly common usage.
And I’m not giving it up no matter what the Taxonomists say.
I don’t know. It seems like the kind of mistake a monkey would make.
The mighty Oozaru.
Some languages have the same word for monkeys and apes
This is actually the reason why taxonomic names are so important.
Particularly to taxonomists,
Just don’t make said mistake around the Librarian.
Ook!
Best to avoid the M word entirely, just to be safe.
And since great apes are a subset of old world monkeys, we are also monkeys. And since those are in turn a subset of mammals, we are also mammals.
Great Apes? What’s so great about us?
Are you sure it wasn’t grate apes on account of being fire users?
It’s “great” as in “Great Britain”, meaning “large”.
And what is the deal with fire anyway? What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go? We’ve been using the stuff for millennia but is anyone asking these questions?
Nope. Apes and old world monkeys are entirely different subsets of primates.
Apes are monkeys though.
Or at least, there’s no grouping that includes both old and new world monkeys that doesn’t include apes.
Oh, it’s another one of those “squares are rectangles but rectangles aren’t necessarily squares” things…
Could be worse, we could be Grape Apes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_d583FHxPQ
Strap in, Joe.
This’ll take a while.
Joe’s wanted to strap in a while ago and it got him punched.
C’mon Joe, cut her a break, given the level of brainwashing she went through, this is actually pretty good progress.
Feel like she could have worked through all of this *before* sending Dan in to wake him up.
Pretty much what I said/thought yesterday.
But she couldn’t. She needed her partner on the project to spur things along.
All things considered, I think Joe is being pretty patient and considerate here.
Compared to Becky’s pro-activeness the moment she got here and started hanging out with Dina, this sort of progress feels like putting off opening for months only to suddenly do an all-night cramming session the night before the final. Yes, you’re learning a lot all at once, but it’s mostly because you put off your responsibilities and HAVE to do it all at once.
At least it is happening with the class’s first assignment. It could have really been put off until the final!
If it doesn’t have a tail it’s not a monkey, it’s an ape.
…What, really? Are you sure?
Even if it has a monkey kind of shape?
Yes: :apes don’t have tails, generally understand basic tool use and many are able to recognize themselves.
(Kyrik, they’re singing a Veggie Tales song.)
A kite has a tail! Then it’s a monkey
A comet has a tail! Then it’s a monkey
for the most part, yes, but some species of macaques lack tails and are still monkeys, because nature hates Rules.
I say this with every inch of my biomedical degree: FFFFFFFFFuck taxonomy.
One of my recent eye-openers with regards to how messy it all is, is that not only is there no singular fish family, there also is no singular tree family. The article I read about that went into the latter had one of the best sub-headlines as it went into detail on this:
“Why do trees keep happening?”
“Well, when a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much, the daddy tree slips the mommy tree his wood.”
Dear heavens, it is two-thirty and I should NOT Abe laughing this loudly. That was fantastic humour
Oh I wish daddy trees wood keep it to themselves. My allergies however are in direct response to the seasonal bukkake fest of trees just spooging it out all over the place.
Now that’s what I call a 10/10 joke!!!!
And people claim that cum burns when it gets in their eyes. Lady, you have no idea!
Tree bukkake needs to stop so I can see out of both eyes.
Kind of obvious: growing taller than your competitors is pretty obvious strategy for a plant. Grow tall enough and humans call you a tree.
AIUI true trees, meaning secondary growth rings producing bark and trunk wood, are ancestral to conifers and angiosperms; first flowering plant was a tree. Within the flowers, the ancestral monocot lost tree-nature; naturally many different monocots have re-evolved tree-like life, such as palm trees. Which are tall and very skinny, because they don’t have secondary growth, they just grow up, not out.
Tree-like life was invented before trees, like lycophytes and fern trees. Yay convergent evolution.
Best if no one looks at how often crabs evolve without consulting any other crab families.
i mean, taxonomy is messy af, but i don’t feel like convergent evolution (of the crab-like body plan, of trees, or of flight for that matter) is an instance of that. those are in most cases, unambiguously different groups converging. taxonomists are not fooled, it’s the rest of us who find it confusing. (i heard someone recently saying that birds were descended from pterosaurs. haha! nope! but i can see how that mistake happened.)
Why would they need to consult other crab families? Is it some kind of mafia deal? I don’t think the animal kingdom (outside humans) is overly concerned with intellectual property rights…
Carcinisation is weird.
honestly, citation needed for how weird carcinization is.
until proven otherwise, my take is this is a marginally interesting phenomenon within crustacean biology that got blown way out of proportion when XKCD made a joke about it.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=carcinization
Damn you Randall Munroe!
Of course this isn’t the first time he’s influenced people or popularized an idea. Nor I am sure, his last. The popularity of the circumlittoral zone in oceanography may also be evidence, but at present google doesn’t “have enough data”.
Also, why do Canadians and New Zealanders in particular have such a fascination with crab-ifying?
Honestly I thought the first half of my post established a less-than-serious tone…
Oh indeed. But if we didn’t take the comically weird seriously, then how could we stand to be so seriously weird about comics?
As someone who is well documented as missing the punchline with a serious reply, I would like to thank you for your contribution at granting new members to the club.
thank you for accepting me in this very elect club Demo.
sorry for being a boring joke-wasting pedant Needful
(ᴗ ̯ᴗ)
phonetic unicode contrite emoji experiment #2
(ᴗ´̯ᴗ)
(ب_ب) <- me being mad at internet for making my sick bespoke emoji only sort of work
not emoji, wha’s the word again. emoticon??? that sounds like Olde English (like, pre-2010)
What are chimps?
Chimps, short for chimpanzees, are our closest ape cousins, sharing 98.5% of our DNA.
Coincidentally men and women share around 98.5% of their DNA.
Um 98.2%, so technically men are closer to chimps than they are to women.
This should surprise no-one.
Not really that obvious on the surface, given that human males lack a baculum.
I’d rather wake up next to a woman, though.
They’re something halfwayish between champs and chumps. Just don’t let them chomp. Fortunately, chemp and sometimes chymp aren’t real words.
… so, wait, if you repeatedly cut off the tails of generation after generation of monkeys, the lack of tails turns them into apes?
(Admit it, for a moment you had trouble deciding whether the animal cruelty or Lamarckian evolution was the worst part of that.)
There’s more to being an ape than not having a tail. Apes are also shown to have at least some ability to use tools, where as monkeys do not.
Several species of macaque have been demonstrated to use tools, as have capuchins, mandrills, and baboons. The lattermost were even cited by Darwin as example of tool-using primates, so “monkeys can’t use tools” can’t even be blamed on being an outdated concept.
Apes use tools. Monkeys use tools. Sea otters use tools – rocks kept in pouches under their forelegs, used to crack shells. Corvids use tools.
Intriguingly, apes, monkeys, and corvids have all been seen to shape tools as well – stripping a branch of its twigs and leaves to better poke termites out of a nest, for instance.
See, this is a little bit of a hot-button semantic issue for some biologists, who insist that you shouldn’t define a category of animal “polyphyletically,” i.e., in a way that excludes some animals with the same most recent common ancestor. I think it’s silly, but what do I know? But by that standard, apes are a large subset of monkeys, since they’re more closely related to the old-world monkeys than the new-world monkeys are. (And of course, humans are a kind of ape, since we’re more closely related to chimps and bonobos than any other ape is.) I think it’s silly, but what do I know? (Also, by this standard whales are fish… as are humans.)
Regardless, “if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey” wouldn’t be right either way, since Barbary macaques don’t have tails, but they’re certainly not apes.
Crows use tools. Ergo if it weren’t for their tails, they’d be apes.
Okay Diogenes
Actually both for taxonomy, and for some types of classy insults, that actually makes a lot of sense. Obsessively stipulating it and religiously demanding it be faithfully adhered to is silly, but the core philosophy makes sense.
Crabs don’t have tails, so they’re apes.
Spiders don’t have tails, so they’re apes.
Manx cats don’t have tails, so they’re apes.
Sometimes lizards transform into apes as a defensive measure.
But none of them use tools.
Octopodes, however, are apes.
Dumbing of Age Book XI: Naw, Monkeys Are Funny
“I’m just a monkey” would sound more convincing coming from Becky.
I know this is classwork-related, but it still is nice she can just openly unpack this with Joe, especially considering Sarah knows, but most of her friends do not.
Joyce can be funny.
Not right now as this existential crisis doesn’t deserve laughter so much as pity.
But she CAN be funny.
I’ll compromise on a pitying laugh.
What I find disturbing is society’s persistent need to label existential awareness as a crisis.
I mean, Joyce is certainly in crisis at the moment about the source and whyfor of her existence.
When she’s happily settled into the same yawning abyss as are we all then I’ll call it awareness.
“You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals,”
“Not now, brain!”
I can’t picture Pinky objecting to rocking out to Bloodhound Gang.
Besides, aren’t we supposed to be trying to take over the world?
I still can’t figure out if that was the flaw in the Brain’s planning, or an intentional decision to prolong the thrill of the attempt. The plan was never “to take over the world” rather “to try to take over the world.”
This is one of those perspectives I never get.
“Oh No! I am not made to be an inferior version of a being I don’t understand, instead I am one of the smartest living things ever, the product of billions of years of natural processes converging on this point in time!”
The second thing sounds cooler.
You aren’t going to get to that point immediately. It’s rough to go from “I am a reflection of divine magnificence” to “I am just an animal”
^This. Like, I had a lot of pent up negative feelings regarding a supposedly all-good, all-powerful literally inventing the concept of pain and how I was supposed to feel grateful that my miserable existence was “gifted” to me… But somehow the mere idea of having absolutely no Big Plan, no Divine Purpose for my life, was still harder to swallow? Indoctrination is a helluva drug.
If that, it’s a drug that’s been infected into us since childbirth. Before we could even say no.
The trick is to spend some time in the ‘I am smarter than all these ‘reflections of a divine being’ who haven’t worked it out yet’ space, then relearn how being a nice person works.
Which is why /r/atheism is (presumably) filled with the worst sort of neckbearded manchildren.
On the other hand, if you were a super-advanced, superior version of something (not that that’s quite the situation, but kind of), wouldn’t you rather be a super-advanced superior cat or crow or dolphin or somesuch?
There’s a lot of really cool animals out there, but primates are kind of… Well, silly. If you’re a pale shadow of the divine, well, you’re kind of stuck with it; you’d be insulting God if you said, “Wait, can’t I be a really smart and cool cat instead?”. But if it’s just that, objectively, there’s not really a realistic way for a super-advanced, superior cat to develop tool usage or societies on a human scale… Well, that just makes you think out on the opportunities we missed out on just because there wasn’t a proper intermediary stage.
(No, no, that has absolutely nothing with Joyce’s reaction here. But when you think about it more deeply… Humans would be way cooler if we were designed as something better than we are.)
Add Furries to the mix, and it is even stranger.
super-advanced superior tardigrade.
like come on.
it’s a no-brainer.
I dunno, Ripper on Star Trek Discovery didn’t have a great time…
I just learned about selfish genetics, most of our DNA is parasitic!
We are weighed down by 4 billion years of evolutionary duct tape repairs, and half our genes exist because they kill the cell their in if the cell doesn’t have enough copies it them.
Thank science we’re on the cusp of controlling them.
Actually we can control them and its rapidly getting easier. On the other hand, as of yet, we mostly have little idea of what we are doing.
Seriously, you can pay money to have DNA designed and manufactured however you want for gene splicing, fairly cheaply at serious hobby level type of expense, and unless you are messing with biological warfare, nobody cares. The trick is designing genes that actually do something interesting.
Would glowing the dark be interesting?
How about growing your own cannabis extract with microbes?
How about growing meat in a petri dish?
Well, yes, but I want pet dinosaurs and kraken and smart horses with single horns and air-whales that produce and trap hydrogen to navigate the skies. I want designer viruses to go in and de-age my cells back, to around 30. I want plants and animals that can survive on Mars and bacteria to start transforming the atmosphere of Venus.
For glowing in the dark, we don’t have to design from scratch. The hack to improve photosynthesis was actually pretty interesting. But mostly, we really don’t know what we’re doing, and the difficulty of predicting protein folding is only part of the problem.
I sure hope we can de-age cells in coming decades. At least then I’ll have options other then pouring my brain into a quantum computer.
A Hydrogen powered blimp-like whale that can fly would be just barely possible.
Unless you want a Jurassic Park style theme park monster, I’m afraid we’ll never have true dinosaurs as pets.
As for the kraken, there’s actually a limit to how big a multicellular organism can get before homeostasis becomes nigh impossible with typical ATP-powered cells. If it’s just a tetraploid giant squid, it shouldn’t be that hard.
How about miniature sharks?
Well, I’m not picky about true dinosaurs. I’ll accept a backwards engineered chicken as long as it is both cute and looks like a dinosaur ought to look.
Could a giant tetraploid squid be trained to attack ships?
I ask for SCIENCE.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but given that squids tend to seek out heat and/or electromagnetic signals to hunt their prey, they may very well be inclined to attack ships, anyway.
Both of y’alls are asking for a Dina-saur attack. Also, I’ll just leave these here. 《— Warning: Link contains throwback dino-chicken face photograph.
I did say true dinosuars were not possible through genetic engineering, did I not?
However, now I can recall that squids just use their plain old eyeballs to locate prey. My bad.
Awww. Chickens *ARE* true dinosaurs. Don’t be mean to the little baby with the monster face. They only used genetic engineering to unlock some latent code that had been overridden by the beak addition. No frog dna, no amber mosquitoes. It was inside the chicken all along.
Personally I think KFC should do a sponsorship mash-up with the final Jurrasic World and start selling KFD. Unfortunately it /is/ Kentucky, so something tells me that ain’t gonna happen.
“Unless you want a Jurassic Park style theme park monster, I’m afraid we’ll never have true dinosaurs as pets.”
I do, though. Give me a pet dino. I’m over here making due with a pet tortoise and a few parakeets, I can handle the real thing.
Not that I don’t think you couldn’t handle AT LEAST one the size of a chicken; there’s literally no DNA intact from any dinosaur remains to date which we can use for the cloning process.
Now, if backwards time travel or at least something that lets us see back in time is possible…..
My son has Celiac, so we have been watching the work on genetically engineering to remove the disease very interesting.
Yup, evolution was developed by Red Green.
It’s worse than that. It’s not just that she isn’t made in the image of a higher being, it’s that she’s made in the image of a lower one.
I think the key to understanding this perspective is realizing that it’s rooted in denigration of animals. For example, they’ll often say that humans having souls means that we’re capable of higher emotions, and that animals like, say, dogs can’t feel love, guilt, loyalty, or compassion.
(Look, this stuff isn’t made up by people who need to base their beliefs in facts, all right?)
Joyce is discovering that by and large she isn’t better than a dog. Which is fine if you see dogs as loving animals that we adopt into our families, but terrible if you’ve spent your entire life treating the word dog as an insult.
*cute a bunch of comments from cat-lovers in 3… 2…*
Higher being? Lower being? What kind of definition are you …
Oh wait. The most evolved organism is God. How did we not see it? Surely the good Dr. will see the inescapable logic and give us an A.
that sounds blasphemous.
She is not a fallen angel but a rising ape.
Risin’ ape! back on the streets!
Did my time, learnt my bible!
Went the distance, now i’m ditching the creed,
Just a girl, deprogramming her mind!
So many times it happens too fast,
you trade your reason for dogma!
Unclench your grip on the yarns of the past
You must fight your way out of those lies!
“I an made to be an inferior being of a thing” is not how religion takes it. You are also immortal and the natal stage of a divine being. Buddhism and Abrahamic Religion makes it clear you’re the big dogs of the universe.
Abrahamic Religion? I don’t know about Muslims, but this one isn’t a Jewish shtick. You can say Christian when you mean Christian.
Except much of Christianity, particularly the Evangelical variety that Joyce was evidently raised with, holds that humans are sinful failures; God is ashamed of us, has already tried to wipe us out once, and our best hope is to suck up to Him enough that when He does it again, He takes the suck-ups to Heaven with him. We’re not seen as the “natal” form of anything – they don’t believe in change like that, remember?
No, according to those types, the way God shows His favor isn’t by making you a better person, it’s by making you rich. Forget all that stuff in the Bible about how it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, or giving away all your goods to follow Jesus, or any of that – God awards cash prizes, bay-bee! So if you’re poor, they shouldn’t offer you the help you need, because poverty means God hates you, right?
(NOTE: This is not the stance of Christianity in general, although to hear Evangelicals talk, you’d think that it was.)
This bothers me so much… I was raised Catholic and the general idea was that, yes we are sinful creatures but God still loves us and wants us to improve and become better people.
And the whole prosperity gospel makes me want to flip tables…
In theory it’s about how the good and faithful will be rewarded in this life, so you should be good and you will see those rewards. It’s not entirely unlike the whole Flood/Sodam/Gomorrah bit you mention below – or how Israel is always said to prosper or be punished based on how faithful the people are. So, it’s not really unBiblical and it would even be that bad of a philosophy, except for one small problem.
It has no relation to reality. We can clearly see that the good are not rewarded and the wicked punished, but trying to reconcile the theology to reality leads not only to seeing the rich as virtuous and not needing to help the poor, but if your poor to seeing that as a moral failing in yourself.
That is a very good point, The people who came up with this whole thing just simply forgot the very important part about NOT focusing on material possessions and success in this life.
Yeah this is a truly awful mentality to have.
You could say that promising rewards in the afterlife is even more of a scam. At least it’s possible to judge the Prosperity Gospel and realize those with the rewards aren’t morally superior to those without.
There’s no way to see if anyone gets rewarded or punished after this life.
Well, to be precise, being all powerful, if yahweh was trying to wipe us out we’d’ve been done. My understanding of the text is yahweh was more doing a ‘soft reboot’.
Pretty much, The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah. It was all because humans became too wicked and evil so God picked the few left who were kinda okay and erased the rest.
I always liked how I was raised that Sodom and Gamoroh was about gay people then read it and it was about gang rape.
And by like, I mean horrified.
Yeah I always facepalm when Christians go “It was about the gays!”. No you idiot it was about roaming gangs of rapists!
If you think that’s messed up, in Numbers 31, Moses commands the soldiers of the Israelite army to kill every man and woman of the Midianite tribe, and to keep the virgin girls for themselves as sexual stock.
Dead serious.
This was from the same guy who wrote the Ten Commandments.
“natal step of a divine being” isn’t even really that common in Christianity. Some various level of “pinnacle of creation” or “chosen people” is common to the Abrahamic religions though. That may be broad enough to just reflect common human perspective though.
“Natal step of a divine being” sounds like LDS to me. I don’t know if any other sects that have that, but obviously I’m no expert
*plays Peter Gabriel’s “Shock The Monkey” on the hacked Muzak*
“I don’t like it–but I guess I’m LEARNING!”
I would have expected “The Bad Touch” by Bloodhound Gang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k
Great choice!
Personally though, I would have gone with “Run Red Run” by The Coasters.
Followed by “(theme from) The Monkee’s” as Joyce accepts her monkeydom.
May as well throw some Stones into the mix too.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zbnvh6I4k4
I might have picked The Monkey’s Uncle by Annette and The Beach Boys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUeCxoCAUZU
I would have gone with George of the Jungle, or Gitarzan.
Apart from my trash goblin shipping going on, I think Joe is a really good character for Joyce to have this conversation with, both in and out of universe.
‘Cause in-universe she’d have Dorothy and Becky who would both have A Reaction to this. Dorothy would try to be gently reassuring and talk Joyce out of her funk when what Joyce wants to do right now is scream and flail her arms and run around in circles. A rational answer isn’t what she needs, she needs to experience the problem before she can figure out what it means and pull herself out of it. Becky I honestly do think would get weird and maybe a little judgmental about it. Not in such a way that it would indicate that Becky doesn’t love her a whole dang lot, but I don’t think that conversation is gonna go smoothly.
Out of universe this is good because if you want this problem solved you go to Dorothy. If you want this problem to become hilarious you go to Joe.
Sarah would work too, but she might just get a little too misanthropic.
Sarah already knows and I get the feeling with her it’s more like “it’s fine, just drop it.”
You know how Danny started dancing around his sexuality with Joe so Joe bluntly asked him if he was gay, because Joe wasn’t interested in talking about feelings and instead thought the solution would be to just find the empirical answer to Danny’s question? That Danny wanting to talk about it and express himself was secondary to just getting to the answer?
I kind of think, with something like this, Sarah is like that. Sarah would want Joyce to get to the answer instead of feeling it, since she only really knows how to show she cares insweeping, dramatic actions.
Actually speaking of Sarah, I just realized that she told Booster she was going to be giddy about Joyce going to biology class and referring to her as a fundie… except Sarah already knew Joyce had given up her faith. I am now even more convinced that Sarah was just actually in a good mood that day and came up with some bullshit to justify why it was abnormal.
And really, would we want an assessment of this problem that doesn’t include the exchange ‘I’M JUST A MONKEY!’ ‘Naw, monkeys are funny’? I think not.
Exactly.
Joe straddles a really precarious line of acknowledging and engaging with Joyce without lionizing or catastrophizing her circumstances. He’s there, he has a snarky line, but more importantly Joyce has to have the opportunity to flip her lid.
And when she’s ready to un-flip out, Joe’s snarky line is there to banter off of.
Seriously I don’t actually want to get together any time soon, eventually the rule of drama will dictate they have Serious Problems or a breakup and I want them to get married and have a domestic hijinks spinoff strip where they fight aliens and robot monkeys.
What? I can dream.
Don’t know what to say the monkeys won’t do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKrwlgiYn-c
Ah yes, Animaniacs, the best cartoon (with Tiny Toons a close second), ever made.
“A planet where MEN and APES evolved from a COMMON ANCESTOR?!”
Humans ARE apes. Great apes, do be exact.
Huh. I guess an ape would make a human doll that talks after all, then.
Joyce went looking for the answer, and doesn’t like what she found.
Cut to Joyce on a horse finding the Statue of Liberty.
Part of me really wants Becky to walk in during this talk and to have heard at least some of this, I mean she just screamed that last part. It would probably remove a lot of anxiety/stress if it was just out that she wasnt a super christian anymore, I mean Becky has excepted Science over the bible already.
If Becky doesn’t find out by accident, Joyce really is going to have to figure out a way to tell her before participating in class gives away the secret
I mean, I feel like you can still believe in a god, and still follow science and evolution and crap, so long as you presume that said god is responsible for said science. It’s essentially impossible to define what that creator deity would be, however, and that may fall further into the realms of philosophy than theology. I’m agnostic for the record.
Of course it’s possible, but it’s not really possible when you took the bible literally, as Joyce did. Sometimes, when you’ve been so thoroughly bullshitted and you start questioning, one more thing just….shatters the foundation and there’s nothing left. Joyce’s faith is like that, I think. It broke before it bent.
Becky’s, on the other hand, is very bendy.
I mean at the end of the day it’s always been less God vs No God and more Very very specific God vs No God.
The divine watchmaker theory was popular for a reason.
Agnosticish who offers the occasional praise unto Anoia, myself. Inasmuch as I believe in any deities, I take a pretty Pratchettian view there. Also, my upbringing wasn’t nearly as authoritarianly religious as Joyce’s or Willis’s – my religious parent does in fact believe in evolution, for one, and the other’s been an atheist my whole life – but I’d absorbed enough Toxic Religiosity through osmosis that I came to a similar ‘wait. I don’t have belief, I just have fear of punishment. That’s not a good basis for being a member of a religion’ thought process when I was thirteen or so. (Religious parent is also from an Anabaptist church, a fact which I’m thankful for since it meant critically examining my beliefs on some level.) I figure any gods that exist and are worth worshipping would have noticed the compulsive anxiety-prayers and agreed this is way healthier on the whole.
I think part of the issue is that Joyce has never been exposed to any scientist who has any sort of religious beliefs or alternative views of religions other than fundamentalist Christianity. Liberal Christianity like Jacob and Becky’s offends her actually as the idea of religious error or metaphor.
Speaking as a neuroatypical person, I think she’d hate anything that was metaphorical in religion so that would really lock out a lot of them.
You certainly can and many people do. That’s broadly the most common Christian approach. It’s Catholic doctrine and common in mainline Protestantism as well.
That’s just not the faith Joyce (or Willis) grew up in.
See, Joe, THIS is why it’s not a thirty second assignment and you literally should have started the SECOND class got out after receiving it. *facepalm*
The Bible says simply, “God created heaven and earth.” It doesn’t go into details. If He wanted to just snap His fingers and magick it into being, OK; if he wanted to make it a long, drawn-out process and do it using ‘SCIENCE!'</i‘, then that’s fine too.
Since when are we puny humans, despite our supposedly-developed brains, able to figure out things like that? We just ain’t that smart … and I offer as proof the fact that almost half the people who allegedly have brains voted for Trump in the last election!!
On the other hand, if the creator were so smart, why’d she create humans?
Because perfection all the time is boring? 😛
For the same reason Frodo didn’t just hitch a ride on an eagle to get to Mount Doom: short, boring story. In the beginning, there was no TV, so the creator had to invent something to watch, and imperfect humans are way more entertaining than an endless screensaver of fish or whatever.
What you’re proposing is theistic evolution. It’s an incredibly weird and unintuitive way to make humans, though, or anything else – evolution has built us all in a super kludgey way.
Everyone loves a rube-goldberg machine. Even god, apparently.
Incredibly weird and counterintuitive is a pretty tight description for reality to be honest so I can’t really rule it out. XD
Reality wasn’t weird and counter intuitive enough, so we invented laws and politics.
And when we got bored with those, we started checking out quantum mechanics.
It also says Heaven and Earth were created in six days. Biblical Literalists don’t do sliding-timescale – they believe it was six literal 24-hour days, as in the work started at 9am on Thursday, October 4, 4004 BC, and finished up at 6pm on Tuesday, October 9, 4004 BC.
(That ties into Millennialist thinking too – you can neatly divide history into 2000 years from Creation to Moses, 2000 years from Moses to Christ, and 2000 years from Christ to the Apocalypse. Don’t look at me, but somehow it all makes sense to them.)
Which does apparently tie into ancient Jewish creation of those timescales, almost all of which were invented after the fact by various editors and authors of the Hebrew Bible, to fit into meaningful cosmic timelines. 4000 years from creation to the Second Temple, with the Exodus occurring 2/3rds of the way through.
That’s it, Joyce, now the healing can begin.
She needs a hug. And, if any exist, a book to catch up on the bio that others might have that isn’t full of Creationist bullshit. 😀
Someone should put together a decent book that covers all the stupid shit that creationists believe. It could be specifically marketed to those who break free of the bullshit and want the truth.
It should be titled “I want to break free” and play Queen when you open the front cover.
Well, it’s not as condensed as one book would be (and considering the subject, I suppose that’s a pipe dream) but ncib has a reading list – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230199/
Ook ook, motherfudger.
this poor boy. like, every interaction he has with Growing Joyce makes me think of that bit in the Gym with Jordan talking about how she’s a weirdo freak but she keeps going and one day will be perfect
Jacob! Jordan is Joyce’s mysterious brother!
But yes, my brain’s been full of that conversation in the workout room, too.
man i knew i’d fucked it up, thankyou =p
It’s actually Joe who makes that remark about Joyce in the gym. Jacob expressed admiration for Joyce’s tenacity elsewhere, though.
*changes to Frieza voice*
“Of course only a MONKEY like you would believe all the nonsense that you do!!!”
Regular Frieza or Abridged Frieza? Because I read it in Abridged version.
They sound about the same, these days.
shes deflating BEFORE OUR VERY EYES
b i l l i o n s
Billions
Hail Sagan
A guy who, notably, had a very mystical view of science.
Pretty sure Sagan was awestruck by science, not that he viewed it as mystic. Kinda goes against the entire philosophy.
He was a gifted communicator. I think he used mystic-sounding language as a tool to communicate that awe to the average person in a way they could relate to.
Yes. Carl Sagan was a very capable and poetic speaker.
How do you define mysticism? I do as an awe inspiring and emotion inducing experience with something greater than yourself.
yes joyce, reject modernity, return to monkey
Das’ racist, Joyce.
ape, technically
The level of trust Joyce is showing Joe here is impressive, she knows the reputation of Joe is a horndog yet she, stubbornly, pushed on through and has gained a confidant, a horny male confidant even
These two are made for each other, I just wonder how long it’ll take for them both to realise it
Joe has had it for Joyce for a while. There is what he says to Jacob after the Joyce/Jacob/Harrison day of confusion, for example.
Trust and friendship is not a bad way to start a relationship
Joe’s attraction to Joyce is a plot thread that runs way back, almost to the beginning of the comic. Early on in his horndog “do” list days it was just physical, but it’s at a deeper level now (as his conversation with Jacob demonstrates).
See also:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/chubby/
I hold that to this day this is still one of the most romantic things I have ever read. I have no CHOICE but to ship.
But a somewhat special monkey that evolved (over millions of years) a number of traits (that exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom in various combinations) that allowed us to get to where we are today in a relatively short amount of time.
The last panel reminded me of this:
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/aad82fa0-3b9c-4884-aa42-6b9dee86d90c
The alt-text doesn’t usually give away the next book title. I guess we can all stop speculating.
Tell that to stock brokers and political commentators!
They’ll have to read it here,
I want to give Joyce the biggest hug, and tell her that the absence of God plus the existence of life (even more, conscious life!) is way way more special than some higher being snapping their fingers for it.
The sheer accident of carbon-based life, surviving eons of hostile conditions, evolving from a soup of aminoacids over million of years ’till it can do science , questioning and observing the universe it inhabits? That’s a precious thing. That does makes us special, even if in the bigger picture we’re barely a wisp of atoms floating in our local supercluster, and sending messages in a bottle.
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
*sniff*
That’s beautiful!
Dearly appreciated ;A; I really like your comments. Are you a scientist?
Thank you! And yes I am!
That’s so so cool! What’s your speciality? 😀 Looks like a physicist according to some comments?
I’m a wannabe-writer who tried to major in Philosophy, then in Anthropology, then dropped out to be a cook and gather as much knowledge as I could have (with the hopes of one day indeed write). So everything interests me – I admire actual scientists a lot.
That … was beautiful.
As a lapsed Catholic who has never COMPLETELY let go of my faith, this is the explanation of atheism someone SHOULD have given me at Joyce’s age.
You know, it’s never too late.
Nah, if I were gonna convert at this point it’d be to something like Unitarianism or Buddhism. Buddhists seem pretty chill.
Shintos seem pretty chill too. Carnivorism is also an option, if you have a love for meat.
I’ve never heard of eating meat being described as a “religion”, and this is coming from someone with four vegetarian sisters (three of whom are vegan).
From what I’ve heard, it’s kind of like Norse religion, where animals keep getting reincarnated until they have their flesh prepared and eaten by humans, after which they get to go somewhere that more or less resembles Nirvana or Valhalla or something.
Faith is a complicated thing. It’s like being in love – You feel it or you don’t, and if you do feel it, keeping up with it is an involved process. I lost my capacity for it many years ago but there’s still a lot to be awed by in this world of ours :3
Frankly, I think it depends on how you view God as the universe as a self-organizing system is hardly something to be dismissed as. Frankly, conciosuness existing is pretty much the nature of the divine as itself as it is an ecosystem developing consciousness for the purposes of describing meaning to reality and that is beautiful.
Pantheists believe the universe is divine and the divine is the universe.
But I admit, I am a Christian orientated theist.
I’ve got no beef with that, there’s a ton of physicists that go back into believing precisely because of this apparent self-organized system. I postulate that we don’t know enough to affirm whether our observations are final (which is also beautiful to me! We keep trying!) and therefore subjecting the universe to this much of an order – Even the speed of light makes exceptions for gravity, and its value was something we thought couldn’t be surpassed.
Pantheism is chill because the universe itself being the divine would make sense to me as an idea of God. Giordano Bruno was a cool dude. My atheism is due to my utter inability to feel faith in anything other than human beings (an irrational belief that gets tested every day AND YET), but even I gaze at the starry sky to be overcome by feeling #Infinity.
The speed of light does not make exceptions for gravity.
It does in General Relativity-based hypotheses. My mistake was only presenting it as an already-proven fact instead of a plausibility still being tested, but hey! Poetry ^^;;
Black holes would be one of these instances. There’s a recent discovery of one whose jet launches particles at 99% of the speed of light, and we literally can’t know what’s past the Event Horizon of supermassive black holes, because it breaks the laws of physics as we know them.
There’s also some instances of Neutrinos observed as being able to surpass the speed of light, and while they’ve been deemed a mistake in measuring due to technical limitations, the idea hasn’t been completely ruled out. Additionally, there’s a theoretical particle called Tachyon (much loved by sci-fi writers), which also works in some models and not others.
Science is a WIP! :3
That was beautiful, and makes me wish the comment section had an upvote feature
I’m really happy this moved so many people ;www; Y’all made my day, no upvote needed ♥
“There is a grandeur in this view of life” – Darwin
Most definitely ♥ We’re very tiny, but we have a capacity to go further as a species than any other we know of
As others have said. Beautiful. Joyce deserves to realize we didn’t come from nothing. Even the tree of life comes from molecules which come from atoms descended from stars made of other atoms (iterate a bit here brother) coalesced from particles made of bits made of energy. Only that is something of whose origin we don’t yet understand. But that’s ok, because there is beauty around us that we are lucky enough to get to perceive while we are here. The universe is as full of why, without god, as it with it. But without god we are blessed with the tools and the volition to answer why, and to know that this is our only chance to be good to each other.
Right back at you ;AAA; The sight set on the future is only one part of being amazed by the universe – Presently we already experience beauty, and our understanding of science only enhances it further.
We don’t know all the answers, and it’s likely we as a species won’t ever have them all, but the fact we make questions, tell stories, and help each other… That’s incredible. The journey is the destination on itself ;www;
this is a really comedic but wholesome strip, great job willis – and i’m really sorry you had to go through that kind of hell.
Joe is being more patient than I expected. Poor Joyce though.
An Ape actually [angry Librarian noises in the background]
Pale Blue Dot speech time?
It’s a really good speech. Someone needs to show Joyce Cosmos, both the Carl Sagan and the Neil deGrasse Tyson versions are good.
Have you ever thought so much Joe is screwed: he got someone with a from elementary school level to do a college assigment…
A “feelings” assignment. They are not making science at the moment so textbooks would be little help anyway.
Na, she can’t be that.
‘Dial M for Joyce’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue and just sounds like she’s a 1-900 number.
You are a great monkey, Joyce.
I mean, believing in evolution or the age of the universe or whatever doesn’t even have to conflict with having religious belief; heck, Georges Lemaître who devised the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic Priest after all.
And a lot of the early opposition to the Big Bang theory was that it was too theistic
Indeed, Stephen Hawking was unable to figure out how there could be a Big Bang unless it just didn’t happen (“there must have been a bunch of stuff beforehand so life didn’t emerge from nothing”) and that wasn’t what the math said too.
Not that it made him religious, Vatican paid for vacations aside. 🙂
Arthur Penrose had the view reality was informational in nature which is that matter doesn’t exist but is literally mathematics sculpted like computer code from quantum waves.
No, Joyce. You’re not a monkey. 😛 You’re still clinging to the false belief that evolution is a linear progression from “least evolved to most evolved”. What you need to realize is that monkeys (as well as dogs, cats, snakes, spiders, plants and mushrooms) are JUST as advanced as humans are; it’s just that their evolutionary strengths went along a different path to ours.
Wait a second. The Old World monkeys are more closely related to us than the New World monkeys. We have a common ancestor with the Old World monkeys that was not also an ancestor of the New World monkeys. So, if the term “monkey” is to have any useful meaning, we are monkeys, too.
Maybe the term “monkey” doesn’t have an evolutionary useful meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould was forced to the conclusion that the term “fish” didn’t, but we all still know what we mean by it.
Bah, everything is quanta. Biology is meaningless.
*Velico-Dina claws at the door*
Right. We’re both monkeys and fish. 🙂
I think more like ape.
I think more like ape too. Be friend?
Oook!
Whether we’re monkeys or apes, we can all be happy sitting down and picking bugs out of each other’s hair.
Me and my monkey, with a dream and a gun
I’m hoping my monkey don’t point that gun at anyone
Me and my monkey, like Butch and the Sundance Kid
Trying to understand why [b]s[/b]he did what [b]s[/b]he did
Why [b]s[/b]he did what [b]s[/b]he did
…Why did my tired brain use the wrong kind of bracket like this?
Ummm, the universe didn’t come from nothing. The commonly accepted Harte-Hawkins singularity hypothesis is literally everything. That’s not nothing.
Of course a
Everything is nothing.
Eat Arby’s.
I like the Pratchett hypothesis: In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Are you suggesting that Mythbusters created the universe?
Better a monkey than a dwarf villanous manipulating creature from outer space.
Sorry, I’m not getting the reference.
Freiza, I believe.
Honestly I was thinking Head Alien. 🙂
I went with Mojo Jojo
No Joyce, not just a monkey because the nature of Monkey was…irrepressible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-SUoHmpRdM
I kinda hope that deeeeeep down Joe find this somehow adorable.
Quite honestly, I don’t think he’d be tolerating it if he didn’t. At the very least, even if he’s a tad irritated by it all, he’s still empathetic.
Wait until she learns that she’s also a fish by technicality
Ah, I sympathise (though for me it was not the realization of my mundane origins but that of the finality of my death that sent me spiraling for a few months.)
Yes. That shock when you realize peharps your existence will just end when you dies, and no heaven is waiting for you…
Truth be told, there is absolutely no way to know what lay in death, the Final Unknown. For all we know, whatever journey awaits in death (provided there is one), could be more bizarre than anything humans could ever conceive of. But that just adds to the wild adventure that is all existence!
It would be awesome if I get this afterdeath fate…
God was created in human’s image
Carl Sagan: Consciousness is the universe becoming aware of itself.
Joyce: SCREW YOU, MYSTIC!
🙂
We are Apes! Great Apes! The greatest ever! And Highly Evolved! Nobody is more highly evolved than we are!
“When you get right down to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago. No different. Our DNA hasn’t changed substantially in a hundred thousand years. We’re still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we’ve evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the fucking jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.”
– George Carlin (2005, Life is Worth Losing)
Joyce is also completely wrong. Life after all emerges from systems that have been developed by complex physics that are extremely fine for the development of life and adaptational.
Most theoretical physicists would go, “Life emerged from math.”
Mind you, if Joyce found out about String Theory, it would break her brain. Because in some universe, not only is God real but the Soggies. Which of course we know is true in her fictional reality.
The hierarchy of the sciences (with apologies to Comte):
Philosophy answers to Sociology
Sociology answers to Psychology
Psychology answers to Biology
Biology answers to Chemistry
Chemistry answers to Physics
Physics answers to Mathematics
Mathematics answers to God…
and God answers to Philosophy
Randall Munroe offers a different take. Remarkably similar in base, but different conclusion.
I would argue that Physics, unlike Math, actually gets checked against reality.
But then I majored in Physics as an undergrad, so that’s not surprising.
Theoretical Physics is the best thing in academia! Its the only field where you can make utterly ridiculous fantasy and be considered a valid theory other than economics.
Seriously, I’d I took a drink every time a reporter misinterpreted theoretical physics, I’d get blackout drunk in no time flat.
…not that I’d ever do that, but you get the point.
Even discoveries in astronomy are often erroneously misconstrued in the media. If any said discovery includes figures of millions or billions, the two are confused 50% of the time when they’re reported in popular media. And I’m HARDLY exaggerating.
I feel for ya Joyce. It’s painful when you finally set down that burden. And will be for a long time.
Apes, I would think.
The only real disagreement I have with Joyce is that she’s not “just” a monkey. Nor, for that matter, is there anything “just” about monkeys. Monkeys are cool.
is it too late to ask for more time?
Reason: half of the pair is wrapping their head around evolution and we are still im the “I’M JUST A MONKEY” phase.
im sure its a common excuse.
“I’m just a fish!” is at least a 300 level revelation.
I take a weird comfort in my primate family. Every once in a while I’ll do something, like hook my fingertips around a tree branch to pull it closer to access some fruit, and think “my distant ancestors did this. We’re all really just smart apes”
We joke a lot about “primate grooming rituals”.
I mean, we made an entire job just for that
DOA Book 11: How Much Unlearning Are We Gonna Have To Work Through Before We Can Get This Dumb Assignment Started?
Next step… learn what actual evolution is.
This is going to be bad. And old.
“Thicc not munky!”
I actually do want them to get together… They actually understand each other really well, and if they could both learn to open up and be vulnerable with each other they would make a great couple. Maybe.
Humans are primates, but not monkeys. Both humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor that was a more basal primate, NOT a monkey.
I return to my lesson on evolution, one modern animal did not evolve from nor will it evolve into another modern animal. A mudskipper will never become a salamander, even if the species loses its gills, its fins become legs, and it takes to an entirely land based lifestyle, that will NOT be a salamander, or even an amphibian, because that’s a totally different evolutionary line.
I’m rather comfortable with being a fish-landreptilelikethingamal-mammal-primate-monkey-bigape-sapien. Really the only part that bugs me is the use of great or greater to mean big, since it carries the connotation of ‘better’ even if that were not intended.
Now if we were called Grate Apes cuz of how much we’re bugging our housemates, THAT would make sense.
It’s a little more complicated than that, since there real is no thing that is “monkeys”. There are two groups considered monkeys – Old World and New World monkeys. We share a common ancestor with Old World Monkeys that’s much closer than our joint common ancestor with New World Monkeys. There’s no monophyletic grouping that includes both kinds of monkeys but that doesn’t include us. That’s how we can argue that humans are monkeys.
As for the other point – it is at least possible for one modern animal to evolve from another extant modern animal. A sub group can branch off to form a new species while the original species remains essentially unchanged. That’s obviously not the case with us and monkeys of course, but then monkeys aren’t a species, but a group of related species. Modern monkey species evolved from older common ancestors that were also monkeys – though eventually you get to the first monkey species and then back to non-monkey primates.
Much like humans did evolve from apes, despite there still being apes around. We didn’t evolve from chimpanzees or gorillas, our closest ape relatives, but from common ancestors who were still apes.
Humans are pedantic monkeys.
You mean pedantic “apes”.
The whole “I’m just a monkey?!” Victorian mindset is where this whole mess begins, and the non-debate started when it lingered with people who wanted to believe being part of a unicorn rather than a goat makes a difference when they are the tail of the beast either way…
Whether Joyce’s parents’ ancestors way back in the Middle Ages were royalty or prostitutes doesn’t change who the present day Browns turned out to be. How much or how little operatic flair there was in the origins of homo sapiens won’t change our baffling schnozz.
You’re almost there. Dump the “I am a monkey” and read the chapter on Common Descent.
Tomorrow:
Joe scribbles frantically as Joyce naps in his lap.
He pokes her awake so she can add her name.
Actually an ape but close
No Joyce, you’re an ape. Apes are one step up on the ladder from monkeys.
At this point it really doesn’t matter ape/monkey. Someday she’ll say “I’m a primate” and later “I’m a fish” but that’s not the big painful part for her.
@damnyouwillis this story is so good
Monke.