2014-01-09
Explanation
The Joke
A bearded man proudly declares his lineage: "My great granpappy warn'''t no monkey. My pappy was, though. My granpa was a fish with legs, and his pappy was a self-replicatin''' strand of DNA." The caption below reads: "I am a Young Earth Evolutionist."
The Humor
The comic satirizes Young Earth Creationism by inventing a parallel absurdity: a "Young Earth Evolutionist" who believes in evolution but on a ludicrously compressed timescale. Young Earth Creationists typically reject evolution and believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old. This character accepts evolution but applies it to a Young Earth timeline, meaning that instead of evolution taking billions of years, his family tree goes from self-replicating DNA to fish to monkey to human in just a few generations. The humor comes from combining two contradictory ideas -- evolution and a young earth -- into one incoherent but confidently stated worldview. The character'''s proud, folksy delivery (using terms like "granpappy" and "warn'''t") parodies the stereotypical rhetoric of anti-evolution advocates while simultaneously accepting the very science they usually deny.
References
Young Earth Creationism is a religious belief that the Earth and life were created in their present forms roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, typically based on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. It stands in contrast to the scientific consensus that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old and that life evolved over hundreds of millions of years.