2014-07-09
Explanation
The Joke
Two people are lying in bed having a late-night philosophical conversation. One asks what the other thinks would happen if they met aliens that were intelligent like humans but "lacked our flaws." The other responds: "Run like hell." The first person then elaborates on why: evolved creatures bear the "indelible stamp of their lowly origins" -- they cheat, they hurt, they kill, and they take pleasure in these things. Therefore, if you encounter a perfect species, there are two possibilities: either their perfection is a deliberate creation by a self-loathing evolved organism (which means it is a lie and you are being trapped), or it is genuine and "you're about to be killed." The second person then asks, "What if that's just chauvinism? Why can't there exist species that aren't horrible like humans?" The first person responds: "I call those species 'food.'"
The Humor
The comic presents a darkly cynical take on evolutionary biology and the Fermi paradox. The argument is essentially that any species shaped by natural selection must be ruthless and violent, because those traits are what enabled survival. Therefore, a species that appears to lack these flaws is either (a) an engineered trap by a species even more devious than humans, or (b) genuinely superior and therefore about to wipe out the inferior species (humans). The final punchline -- calling non-horrible species "food" -- drives the nihilism home by arguing that in evolutionary terms, any species that is genuinely kind and non-violent simply gets eaten by the ones that are not. It is a bleak but logically consistent worldview delivered as pillow talk.
References
The phrase "indelible stamp of their lowly origins" is a direct quote from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871), where he wrote: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."