2014-09-08
Explanation
The Joke
An alien (or person in a sci-fi scenario) explains what pleiotropy is to someone. Pleiotropy means that "one gene controls for more than one trait." The alien describes how humans have had a weird fiction for thousands of years about a god who is simultaneously good and all-powerful, calling this "theological pleiotropy." Over thousands of years, the alien explains, humans have tried to reconcile this through theology and theodicy. The alien notes that despite humans' intelligence, they aren't any smarter than they were 100,000 years ago -- "you just enough brains to do pure mathematics, language, and history." The alien says: "Some guy wrote a carbon-copy fiction 400,000 years later: Shakespeare." The final panel shows a scene at what appears to be a bar, with someone asking for "Another whiskey, please."
The Humor
The comic uses the biological concept of pleiotropy (one gene affecting multiple traits) as a metaphor for the theological Problem of Evil -- the paradox of how God can be both omnipotent and benevolent when evil exists. The alien frames humanity's entire theological and literary history as a long, fumbling attempt to deal with this one conceptual confusion. The joke escalates by suggesting Shakespeare was essentially just rewriting the same material hundreds of thousands of years later, dismissing the entirety of human intellectual achievement as running in circles. The final panel's request for "another whiskey" suggests either the human listener is drowning their existential despair, or the alien finds explaining human limitations to be tediously repetitive work.
References
Pleiotropy is a genetics concept where a single gene influences two or more seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits. The Problem of Evil (theodicy) is the philosophical question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God.