Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

freaks

2022-04-07 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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freaks
Votey panel for freaks
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Explanation

This comic imagines the evolutionary moment when internal fertilization was first "invented" by some ancient creature, depicting the horrified reaction of organisms that only knew external fertilization.

The scene shows what appear to be simple, worm-like or plant-like organisms in a primordial landscape. Two organisms that have just engaged in (or are about to engage in) internal fertilization are confronted by a scandalized onlooker who shouts: "Oh my God! Oh my God! You perverts! You sick freaks!"

One of the "innovators" calmly responds: "We are the future." The other adds: "Our kind will control the world and we will do this all day long."

The caption reads: "Biological fun fact: some creature had to invent internal fertilization."

The joke takes a real evolutionary transition and imagines it as a social scandal. For billions of years, organisms reproduced via external fertilization -- releasing eggs and sperm into water and hoping they met. The evolution of internal fertilization was a major biological innovation that enabled reproduction on land and was a key step in the evolution of reptiles, mammals, and eventually humans.

The comic frames this transition in the language of cultural shock and moral outrage, as if the first internally-fertilizing creatures were seen as deviants by their externally-fertilizing peers. The "perverts" insult is funny because, from the perspective of an organism that simply releases gametes into the ocean, direct physical contact for reproduction would indeed seem bizarre and unnecessarily intimate.

The confident response -- "We are the future" -- is both comedically arrogant and literally true, since internal fertilization did indeed become the dominant reproductive strategy for the most complex land animals.

View History (1) Original Comic