Regarding discussion about if Ross here is the gentleman from Comic numbe 259, he’s a separate guy. I just coincidentally pulled the general “look” out of my head a second time.
Deleted dialogue: "You know evolution is just a theory right?" "Of course it is! "Theory" means it's been proven. An unverified guess is called a "hypothesis". "
aww, was kind of hoping Then might have done some studying in preparation for the expected questions.
Still think he’s got a point, seeing he doesn’t have our benefit of knowing he’s in a fantasy comic world. 😀
Oh well… there goes Selkie’s space ship.
“Theory means it’s been proven.”
That’s… not how science OR language works.
“Theory,” as I understand it, means a hypothesis that has held up under some level of scrutiny, specifically that scientists have been able to extrapolate from the theory to make educated guesses (predictions) about other things, and those predictions have come true enough that they’re like, “Well, until we find conflicting evidence, this is actually holding up pretty darn well.”
Which is how they’ve “proven” the Theory of Relativity: The math holds up for predictions of things they’ve never studied before.
But throughout time, theories have been challenged and disproven; they were simply the most coherent theories that the scientific community could manage at the time. Like certain models of physics before we cracked open the uncrackable atom and discovered Quantum Mechanics. (Incidentally, if you want to wrap your mind around some of the aspects of QM, there’s a Minecraft mod for it. Objects that change based on observation. It’s pretty neat.)
One of the things that bugs me about grouping Evolution (capital E: one species changes into another species over millions of years) with the other theories and going “Well, Gravity’s pretty obvious, and Evolution has the same word attached” is that a process that requires billions of years to achieve changes, via a mechanic we’re merely hypothesizing about, is not as easy to test as dropping a few weights off the leaning tower of Pisa.
We’ve got evolution (small e: within a species, changes can happen over time — the moths or the finches and such — but it remains the same species), but it’s a leap to go from that to Evolution, and that leap requires some pretty strong proof. They’ve been trying with fruit flies (because of the short generational lifespan and ease of altering their genetics), but, last I heard, “fruit flies refuse to become anything other than fruit flies under any circumstances whatsoever.”
Our scientists have pretty much proven the Big Bang — the start of the universe — and all the math adds up and says we had a beginning, time itself had a beginning, the universe isn’t eternal, and our expansion is too energetic to ever bounce back upon itself, stuff like that. It’s fascinating.
But we haven’t the first clue about the mechanics by which:
1. Matter and energy came from void and the inert
2. Order and structure came from chaos (order doesn’t increase, it decreases)
3. Life came from the inanimate (life being that which takes in energy from its environment, uses that energy to move and grow and reproduce, and excretes waste back into the environment)
Or, the one that gets me: Sexual Reproduction came from Asexual Reproduction, in two creatures at the same place and time, in complementary ways… and this happened REPEATEDLY, creating the wide variety of reproductive methods that exist in the animal kingdom, everything from ducks (corkscrews) to frogs (necrophilic mating that somehow still works) to slugs (darts).
Then, also:
5. Self-awareness came from lack of self-awareness
6. Creativity came from lack of creativity
7. A sense of morality came from amorality
One year, I spent six months trying to determine — Descartes-style — what I could believe in, if I didn’t take my core beliefs for granted. And near the end, I came up with a list much like this one. What I would have to believe “somehow just happened, we’re not sure how it works” if I were to discount the idea of a supernatural Creator. What I would have to accept on faith as having developed, over time, from absolutely nothing.
That’s when I came to the conclusion that believing in atheism — not just “we don’t know” (reasonable, and not a belief) but “there’s definitely no God and nothing beyond the physical” (definitely a belief, unproven) — requires NO LESS FAITH than believing in a God who sometimes doesn’t seem to make sense. And that humans trying to make sense of God may be a bit like a cricket trying to figure out how a 747 works.
Atheism is not belief, but a lack of belief. Though atheism isn’t as much “there is definitely no god” but more like “there is currently no reason to think there is a god”. Kind of how right now I’m confident in saying there are definitely no dragons, though if compeling evidence shows itself I’d be willing to reasess my stance – that’s how rational science works.
Another thing to consider is occam’s razor – using “god” as an answer for any question just makes it an even more complicated one – where did he come from, then?
Your level of debate intimidates me! So I will contribute with due deference and the expectation that someone will point out where I’m going wrong.
As I understand it, “the theory of evolution” is shorthand for “the theory of evolution by natural selection”. That is, it’s a theory of the mechanism of evolution. Evolution itself is taken as a fact, because species have been observed to split- see for example
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/evolution-watching-speciation-occur-observations/
Change of animal morphology be selective breeding is just a form of evolution by non-natural means, which has been a fact of agricultural life since man first chewed straw while leaning over farm gates. Darwin was concerned with how it could happen without human intervention.
Deist myself- not optimistic enough to be an atheist!
Then’s a bit of a glib beggar, though, isn’t he?
Agnosticism. The word you’re looking for is Agnosticism. Atheism is, there is no god. Agnosticism is ‘there may be a god, but I know of no proof, and the systems that claim to present proof do not.’ It’s a small nitpick, but as I self-identify as agnostic, one must share ones knowledge where one can.
Unlabeled 4: Alright. Sexual reproduction coming from asexual reproduction. So, asexual reproduction works very well in simple creatures, such as Amoeba, bacteria, etc etc. However, incest shows very well that the less simple a creature gets, the more problems asexual reproduction has. Yes, incest. Because it obeys -most- of the same rules, and all the recessive genes that you’d normally have turned off AREN’T turned off. As such, the more advanced a creature gets, the more likely the cells are going to rampantly and wildly expand out of control resulting in the death of the host.
5: Self-awareness coming from lack of self-awareness…..dogs are self-aware. Birds are self-aware. They are aware that they themselves are hungry, or need to move or…etc etc. Certain animals have enough brain-power they can hold grudges, such as pigs, or dolphins. Many act for personal motivations before pack motivations. We have no way of knowing currently if single celled organisms can register thoughts, but as they are capable of motion, it’d be a safe gamble.
6: So, animals build nests, have for quite some time. Birds build nests, many mammals make burrows or other homes for themselves, lizards and snakes make nests….most animals have some means of covering for themselves, and yes, this is ‘ultimately’ an act of creativity. Humans built larger nests, and this resulted in them then needing shinier gewgaws for their particular mating rituals. A shiny stone ain’t as impressive as a painted portrait, and once you’ve got stone walls between you and your predators (primarily other humans), there’s not as much stopping you from really fancying up your particular nest.
7: So, this one’s showing bias, as it presumes humans are acting in a moral manner or know what morality is offhand. Many humans considered cannibalism to extend their own life perfectly fine. The Aztecs acted in manners we would today consider reprehensible, and yet they aren’t a huge deviation from the human norm to our knowledge. War after war has had human mowing down other human without any personal disagreement beyond where the two had been born. Extermination wars, to kill off genetic lines that were almost identical, have happened more times then I care to count, even if in most instances the idea got tossed fairly early on, or were done by weak, stupid men. So, what you instead have is a sense of emotional response. This concept makes me angry, so I will hurt it. This concept makes me happy, so I will protect it. Religion makes a person happy, and somebody gets told Religion says kill thing, so they kill thing. King makes a person happy, and somebody gets told king says kill thing, so they kill thing. They might become less happy with King or Religion due to this, or they might feel reaffirmed, depending on their personal experiences, but yeah. Another way to think of it is that feral children who have grown up in the woods -do- exist, and they will literally attempt to rip out your throat in more extreme cases, even though the animals they grew up with wouldn’t do such to each other, as you are -not- one of those animals, and they’ve only seen those animals not attack eachother.
Now let’s get on to the big bang argument, because…sure.
1: The laws of thermodynamics disagree with you. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, all the matter ‘needed’ for the big bang already existed, it was merely joining up on the massive grouping of material that was forming before the bang. It might have gotten infinitely small across the course of the smashing in, but it might still have been fairly large by todays standards to see all the matter that made up the universe gathered together in one place. Same goes for energy. It all existed, in kinetic, potential, thermal, or electrical forms, and has since then.
2: This is your weirdest line of the grouping here. Nothing of what I’ve heard sounds -orderly-, if anything, everything got wilder and more chaotic then when there was virtually nothing. If there is nothing but dust and chunks of rock in the middle of nowhere, everything is ordered, you have no shapes to worry about. Then a huge explosion happens, everything wildly veers off in every which direction, and eventually everything stabilizes into a shape, which is what happens when time is allowed to occur.
3: You’re coming at this one from an odd angle. We know that bacteria can survive on comets. The main question here, inasfar as I can get it, is that you believe that they did not exist on the planet prior. Of course, you could be meaning ‘where did the first bacteria come from’, as in, it clearly had to be placed there, except…it didn’t. It actually -is- possible for something to just exist without precedent. It’s a strange thought, I actually do agree, but it can occur, the issue comes when you claim that everything that exists has to have something cause it to exist, therefore god. However, in that scenario, god itself has to have something to create it, and on and on and on, it’s one of those arguments that gets awkward fairly quickly.
For the record, I can understand where you’re coming from, but the direction you’re coming at it from is odd. If you leave everything to personal research, especially research you’ve allowed yourself to bias in the manners you’ve done, it’s got its’ own risks and its’ own insanities attached to it. Truth be told, it may be wisest to simply work hard and wait patiently for death to find out what belief system is closest to being correct. Searching for the truth in this area is not going to end in any easy answers, and often ‘easy answers’ are going to be tempered very heavily into whatever the region you’re living in has as its’ belief system.
Atheism is “there is no god” in the same sense as you would say “there are no faeries” – none would say the later claim requires faith, right?
And agnosticism deals with whether the (non)existence of god can be empirically proven at all. One could be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist, too. Agnosticism itself makes no statement about the existence of such itself.
Atheism is the belief that there is no ‘god’. Polytheism is the belief that there are multiple gods. Deism is the belief that there is one god. Autotheism is the belief that one can become god. Pantheism is the belief that the universe is god.
Each of these fundamentally holds a belief without need for empirical proof. It is possible for one to be a member of any of these beliefs and not inherently be a member of a religion, however if you are an atheist, then per your standings you would not believe in god until incontrovertible proof to the contrary arose, as in, the greater power showed up in front of you, bent physical laws like a horse shoe, and then said “Yep, am god”, and even then that might result in doubt because, y’know, scifi, could just be something wacky from that fucking with you. As such, directly claiming to atheism as opposed to agnosticism is directly attaching to a belief system in which you both are not looking for god and would likely not believe god even if it did appear in front of you.
Agnosticism DOES make no statements about the existence of god, and I do identify my religion as ‘agnostic’, as in, I am looking for empirical, scientific proof of god patiently, but until then, I will not take any one opinion one way or another in regards to god. Although I do find it strange more religions haven’t co-opted evolution and started using the fact we ended up with what we did as evidence that the creator is smart. Maybe I just haven’t heard the right arguments yet.
But again “looking for empirical, scientific proof of god patiently” is in direct opposition of agnosticism – which claims god is unknowable and can not be empirically proven or disproven.
Addendum to my previous post, my apologies
Plenty would say claiming there is no ‘something’ would require faith. Humanity has not yet delved the full depths of the planet, and there are many insects we have not yet identified. Claiming that there are no insects that mimic flesh in appearance to the point of looking like spindly humans blindly would require faith, especially considering there are parts of the world we have not explored at all yet. (-coughs- murdercannibal island -coughs-) Arguing that such entities could not have the intelligence of humans, or magic powers, does not require -as- much faith, but you are still arguing just as blindly as someone who fully believes in a fairy tale. You, after all, do not know everything, and therefore cannot know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are correct.
Apologies, you helped me find out a thing today, I was given a wrong definition a while back and have been waving it incorrectly. There isn’t a word for what I am then. As atheist is definably not the correct word, even though I do not believe in a god.
For some reason I can’t reply to the bottom level of comments so I’m replying to this one. Theism is the belief in gods. Atheism is the lack of that belief. It doesn’t need to go any farther than that. It’s not “belief in the lack of gods”, that’s not how language works.
I would like to come in with a quote by Terry Pratchett in his book Feet of Clay;
“No it’s not!” said Constable Visit. “Atheism is a denial of a god.”
“Therefore It Is A Religious Position,” said Dorfl. “Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The Atheist Truly Did Not Believe, He Or She Would Not Bother To Deny.”
Well, there are as many definitions of “Deist” as there are Deists. Personally, I think there is one Creator God, but that no human being has ever had the right to speak for God- or to attribute any characteristics to God (gender, colour, preference of sexual activity etc.)
We do however have the coolest theme song, thanks to Falco. Altogether now- “I’m a deist, I’m a deist…”
No need to apologize, and it’s a common misconception so easy mistake to make, too.
I blame the US where being an “atheist” can get you labeled a pariah, so people try to avoid that label at any cost in some circles.
It gets even more complex – there’s gnostic theism (“There’s a God(dess) and I know so!”), agnostic theism (“There’s PROBABLY a God(dess), but I don’t know for sure”), agnostic atheism (“There’s probably NOT a God(dess), but I don’t know for sure”), and finally gnostic atheism (“There’s NO God(dess), and I know so!”).
Saying “believing in atheism requires NO LESS FAITH than believing in a God” is like claiming not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Not really, you’re just collecting bottle caps instead. Both are belief systems presumably based on personal experience and individual judgment as to others experiences. It’s agnostics who aren’t taking anything on faith, they want proof. It’s a common misunderstanding.
atheism
[ey-thee-iz-uh m]
noun
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
agnostic
[ag-nos-tik]
noun
1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
2. a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.
3. a person who holds neither of two opposing positions on a topic:
Socrates was an agnostic on the subject of immortality.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
A comparison I used to hear all the time was “claiming god exists is like claiming that there is an invisible cat sitting on a chair, you can’t prove it,”
Let me take that comparison to illustrate the difference.
The Theist says; I can hear the cat, I can see the results of where it’s been and what it has done, so I believe there is a cat there.
The Atheist says; I don’t care if you think you heard a cat, I didn’t hear the cat, and even if I did hear something it was just a creaky door that you THINK sounds like a cat. There is no invisible cat.
The Agnostic says; there is no way to prove there is a cat there so until someone comes up with a way to prove it empirically I’m not going to believe either way.
The reason for the confusion I think is that people aren’t generally educated on theisms and if all you’ve heard is “those who don’t believe in a god are called atheists” you would tend to lump everyone who doesn’t believe in God in that category but it just isn’t that simple. In my experience most people who think they are atheists under this understanding are actually agnostics. They either believe that it is unprovable or would be willing to believe if someone COULD actually show them some PROOF; they just haven’t seen any so for now they don’t believe.
Just like there multiple Theisms (with a belief in god/s); Polytheism, Monotheism, Autotheism, Pantheism, etc there is also Atheism and Agnostics. It’s not a black or white question and that doesn’t even begin to cover the differences between different Deist beliefs. However the rule of thumb is if there is theism in the name somewhere it is a belief structure. The only one that doesn’t is Agnostics by definition.
1. Matter and energy came from void and the inert
String theory is trying! Let’s see what comes of that.
2. Order and structure came from chaos (order doesn’t increase, it decreases)
Wrong. The Sun exists, complexity can grow if energy is pumped into it.
3. Life came from the inanimate
We know more than a little. We have some idea when it started and in what conditions, we know how cell membranes can naturally occur.
Sexual Reproduction came from Asexual Reproduction
Wrong. Single called organisms often absorb RND and DNA around them, we do too. RNA may even be a necessary nutrient! We’re always finding something new it can do. It is through this that cells started sexual reproduction. The formation of eukeriots is neat.
5. Self-awareness came from lack of self-awareness
Define awareness. As far as I can tell, looking too closely at someone turns them into a Chinese Room.
6. Creativity came from lack of creativity
What? What does this mean?
7. A sense of morality came from amorality
Morality isn’t inborn, empathy may be. All social creatures have empathy. Evolution has GREAT explanations for why mothers don’t kill their kids.
Big E “Evolution” is the same as “evolution”, same mechanism, it is just a matter of degree. And speciation has been observed, it is well documented.
“A sense of morality,” btw, is part of that feeling of “things SHOULD be different” or “things OUGHT TO be different” from what IS.
Bob took Jim’s hat. Bob SHOULD NOT have done so.
Ann’s child died young. The child SHOULD have lived.
Casey saw Robin about to die, and didn’t even try to help. Casey SHOULD have tried to help.
So imagine an alien species that has no such construction in their language. And try, somehow, to extrapolate “should” out of “is” and “is not,” with something stronger than “I want it to be X” or “the fact that it is not X makes me feel upset somehow.”
Alright then. So I’ll cut in here.
I know Bob. I know the law. I know Jim. I care that the law exists. I care that Bob exists. I care that Jim exists. Bob has caused something unpleasant to occur to Jim. This makes me displeased. Therefore, Bob has done something bad.
I know Ann. I do not know her child. I do know that she suffered great pain and invested many months to give birth to the child. I know her instincts to give birth to a child, her biological clock, are upset. Therefore, her suffering is shared and I need to make her feel better where I can.
I know Casey, I know Robin. Robin suffered because Casey didn’t help Robin. Therefore, I am upset at Casey.
I’m simplifying a lot of mental processes here, I’ll confess, but yeah. This is how thoughts ‘work.’ It isn’t inherent to any one thing. I’ve heard people have died and smiled, because in spite of the fact that they are human beings capable of improving as human beings and becoming more pleasant to others, they had shown no signs nor intents of doing so, only of causing harm to others, therefore they were people whom I quietly celebrated the death of.
An inherent sense of morality that provides a moral compass doesn’t work in any sense, and I’m glad you’re not going that direction, however, an inherent sense things OUGHT to be different exists even so far back as dogs, monkeys, etc etc. Humans have enough brainpower to realize where they -can’t- effect change, but a dog might bite you if you are ‘bad’, a monkey might steal an item if it believes it wants it, and on and on.
Go back far enough, and one can find a common ancestor between a bush and a human. Good ‘ol mutation and billions of years.
Good parable to really get how evolution works is The Ship of Theseus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
One thing that might explain this if sarnothi indeed did have shared history with the native indians – and it’s just once the european conquerors arrived that they collectively decided to stay out of it and go into isolation.
Well, Ross could be Ralph’s brother …
“Don’t tell them our scientists think humans evolved from eels. Don’t tell them our scientists think humans evolved from eels. Don’t tell them our scientists think humans evolved from eels…”
MadTinkerer, More likely a species similar to bowheads. of course humans did too.
So Pants is the missing link? He certainly seems like he’s eaten enough people parts to have made the jump…
I would say less of a “missing link”, which would imply they are part of our evolutionary process, and more a divergent line. The Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan suggests that we were a more aquatic species and most of what makes us different from other animals are all aquatic adaptions. The fact that we have subcutaneous fat distributed all over our bodies like seals and cetaceans, that our blood pressure and oxygen consumption change underwater, and that we have lost most of our body fur except hair on our heads (that were most likely sticking out of the water as we foraged in tide-pools, and/or are sexual signalling). It explains why we walk upright (from wading) but also why our backs and knees tend to give out from all the walking upright (because we used to be in the water all of the time and the buoyancy helped). Babies automatically hold their breath if you put them in water and have some pretty good swimming instincts, but they also lose them at a later point in development and have to be actually taught how to swim.
If humans and Sarnothi came from a common ancestor it had to have been way way far back, pre-Neanderthal/Denosivian split I would think for the amount of differences between us. I think they’d have to be farther back than Native American/First Nations, but it would be really cool though if the Natives of this world knew about the “Lake People” and had legends of them helping honorable fishers or something.
Right. The missing link would be the unknown common ancestor of the sarnothi and humans. The sarnothi are more like a missing branch.
Also, a “hypothesis” is a bit more than an unverified guess. It’s “a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.” And “for a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
The Aquatic Ape theory doesn’t account for the Sarnothi, because gills. In order to have gills, the common ancestor would have to be much further back than any primate. For that matter, didn’t we see that Sarnothi children hatch from eggs? That means they’re not even mammals.
Yeah, there is that… However, from Merriam-Webster we get –
Definition of mammal
: any of a class (Mammalia) of warm-blooded higher vertebrates (such as placentals, marsupials, or monotremes) that nourish their young with milk secreted by mammary glands, have the skin usually more or less covered with hair
Monotremes lay eggs, so we can’t rule that out. Sarnothi do feed their young from mammary glands though; https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie781/ so they are mammals.
The gills may be some kind of throwback like how some humans have tails. Evo-devo shows that we do have gill-like structure in the early stages.
Sarnothi aren’t warm-blooded, though.
They’re not?
The terms coldblooded and warmblooded are oversimplifications. The terms are catchalls for three different aspects of metabolism: the way an animal heats his body, the consistency of the animal’s body temperature and the consistency of an animal’s metabolic rate. In general, coldblooded animals derive heat from external sources, and their temperature and metabolic rate vary greatly. Conversely, warmblooded animals heat their bodies internally, and they have relatively stable temperatures and metabolic rates. Some animals exhibit mixed traits and are not easily categorized as warm- or coldblooded.
The sloth, for example, is a mammal that could be argued to be cold-blooded while the leatherback turtle is a reptile that could be called warm-blooded.
Tell that to the platypus, who has hair, breaths air, nurses her young, and lays eggs.
No Ross they’re just a different species all together.
At least Then has something going for him. He’s a terrible person but he’s sorta funny at times.
Then is the sort of person who can make you mad without getting you angry.
Um. Okay, I’m just going to accept that this is Dave’s world, and therefore all the arguments, above, about what is or is not true in OUR world… do not apply. This is not, and is not meant to be, a hard science fiction story.
That way I don’t have to bother my head about whether Dave has understood the science right. I don’t think he has, and moreover it doesn’t sound like he’s worked out an actually possible path, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not what the story is about. It’s about people. And this people-story is going to assume the Sarnothi are native to Earth. Somehow. Doesn’t matter how. Don’t ask. Don’t look behind the curtain. They just are. They’re kin.
You know, I’m happy with that.
I’ve been remaining silent on the plausibility discussion, because I wanted to see how they played out without me stepping in and shutting down by virtue of being present. The author stepping in can sometimes shut down a conversation topic, and I prefer seeing what people say about the subject.
My thoughts on the plausibility of ‘divergent evolution’ as an answer to where sarnothi came from is, to be honest, pretty much as you said: that’s the world setting, and it worked inside of that setting. I see it as being like dragons. Dragons can not exist in a setting that mirrors the real world exactly. They’re too big and too heavy to remain airborne by wind alone, and exhaling liquids that ignite on contact with oxygen (breathing fire) just isn’t a thing. But inside the settings of The Seven Kingdoms or Middle Earth, it works out to be functional. The sarnothi are the same way.
Human evolution is an ongoing process and non-trivial changes can happen even within the span of hundreds of years. This bit of news is relevant to
a comic about water living humanoids; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-sea-nomads-may-have-evolved-to-be-the-worlds-elite-divers/
The Great Lakes began to form at the end of the last glacial period around 14,000 years ago, so Selkie’s people already had more time to evolve than the sea-nomads.
Also, nothing says they’ve always been in the Great Lakes, there were lakes in North America before the Great lakes – and some, like Lake Agassiz, were huge.
Missing link doesn’t make sense. There’s always a missing link in everything. We can only determine that said missing link isn’t required to link two things together.
The last two panels can be viewed as the meeting of two kinds of ignorance. Neither one is scientifically knowledgeable. Then doesn’t even know that ‘anthropology’ has nothing to do with evolutionary biology, which is what Ross was asking about. That’s the first clue. And Ross’s understanding of evolution is limited to a catch phrase he’s heard somewhere, one that he vaguely recalls has something to do with the subject.
So we’re not supposed to be getting scientific exposition here. We’re getting a “here there be dragons” handwave. (Thank you, Dave! Dragons are exactly the right comparison!) People will muddle through.
“Childless Snark Factory.” *Snerk*
I know! That delighted me, too!
Yes – I’m stealing that description when talking to parents from now on! Great line Dave
That transcript is kind of garbage. A working theory doesn’t mean that it’s a proven. When using the word “proven” it makes it feel like it’s 100% and I doubt anyone is going to say that’s the case as far as evolution is concerned.
And I’m not one to discount evolution. It’s a fine theory. But like most theories, at some point it could be changed or disproven.
I enjoyed reading all the comments…however I know and believe there is a God.
Glad to hear some of my ruminations amused. And glad to hear you have faith in a topic. I hope the topic pays you back for your devotion.
If you know you don’t need to believe – and vice versa. 😀
Can I give temporary props to mister bald headed guy?
He’s not being 100% respectful, but he’s not following stereotype completely. He didn’t try to punch out the alien, and while he’s forcing the issue, it seems like he’s doing so, understandably, out of a few moments of concern for his kid, as opposed to simply because “It’s different and I’m scared!”
I don’t understand it, therefore it is dangerous.
vs.
I don’t understand it, therefore I need to learn.
So therefore there must be more “Sarnothi” around somewhere if we’re talking divergent evolution. They can’t have developed in Lake Superior, as it didn’t exist until the end of the last Ice Age. Or is that getting too much into Whole World issues when the story wants to stay in Wisconsin?
So they’re basically the “Creatures from the Black Lagoon.”
Kinda surprised nobody in-comic has made that reference yet.
(Or if they did I apologize. I haven’t been able to afford my meds lately and I have major brain fog.)
Going by how the comic treats pop culture it’s probably “Critter from the Obsidian Bayou” in their world.
High throughput DNA sequencing has been a thing since 1987. Surely the Sarnothi genome has been determined, and their place in the tree identified.
You have a point. That is what one would have logically expected the government to do, very early on, but Dave isn’t going to let the story go there. For very good reasons: This isn’t hard SF, it’s dragons.
So, turning the logic around: Since the Sarnothi genome has not been determined, and their place in the tree has not been identified — and isn’t going to be — therefore high throughput DNA sequencing must not exist in Selkie-world.
I NOW officially like Then, “childless snark factory” is an endearing self reflexive assessment that I can honor. Well done, Sirrah, that you know yourself, I respect that. May you not become a mangy old curmudgeon, and may the scale rot pass you by, may the lasers please not kill you when they go off in the sky. May your gills be always moist enough, so you can take another breath, … cause when the Ick gets you, it’s the kiss of death.