fish
Explanation
The Joke
One scientist asks another "What are you doing?" The second scientist replies "Adding human-type pain receptors to this trout." When asked why, he explains: "Because philosophy has gotten us nowhere." The caption below reads: "Instead of arguing over whether fish feel pain, why not engineer fish that definitely feel pain and be done with it?"
The comic addresses the longstanding philosophical and scientific debate about whether fish can feel pain. This is a genuinely contested question with implications for animal welfare, fishing practices, and ethics. Rather than continue the debate, the scientist takes a hilariously pragmatic (and horrifying) approach: just genetically engineer fish to definitely feel pain, thereby making the philosophical question moot. Of course, this "solution" is absurd because the ethical concern was about reducing suffering, not confirming it.
The Humor
The humor lies in the perfectly wrong-headed application of scientific problem-solving to an ethical question. The scientist treats "do fish feel pain?" as a technical uncertainty to be resolved rather than a moral concern to be addressed. His solution technically answers the question (yes, these fish definitely feel pain now) while completely missing the point (we were asking because we wanted to avoid causing suffering). It's a classic SMBC move: taking a logical framework and applying it so literally that it produces a monstrous outcome, satirizing the way pure rationality without ethical grounding can lead to terrible conclusions.
References
The question of whether fish feel pain is a real and active debate in biology and philosophy. Research has shown that fish have nociceptors (sensory neurons that respond to harmful stimuli), but whether this constitutes conscious pain experience remains disputed. The debate has practical implications for fishing regulations and aquaculture practices.