2012-06-19
Explanation
The comic shows a woman delivering an elaborate "pickup line" to a man, structured as a perfectly optimized mating proposition from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. She offers to raise their child on a high-nutrition diet without his help, freeing him to "impregnate other females," and promises to tell other women he was a caring mate, thus eliminating the social cost of being an absent father. She caps it off by inviting him to "enjoy the fact that my waist to hip ratio is 0.7... baby." The man responds with a stunned "Mother of God." The caption at the bottom reads: "Evolutionary psychologists have the best pickup lines."
The joke satirizes evolutionary psychology's tendency to reduce human romantic and sexual behavior to cold reproductive optimization strategies. The 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio is a real finding from evolutionary psychology research (particularly by Devendra Singh), which suggests this ratio is cross-culturally perceived as attractive because it signals fertility. By having a woman deliver a "pitch" that addresses every theoretical concern a male should have according to evolutionary psychology -- paternal investment, reproductive access, social reputation -- the comic highlights how absurdly clinical and unsexy these frameworks become when applied literally to actual human courtship. The man's shocked reaction suggests that while the offer is theoretically "optimal," the delivery is hilariously inappropriate for real human interaction.