Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic takes the "intelligent design" argument seriously — and concludes that if a designer did create life, they were clearly not very good at it. The human body is presented as a catalog of terrible design decisions: the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes an absurdly long detour, the spine is poorly adapted for upright walking, the birth canal is too narrow, and we breathe and eat through the same tube.

The Humor

The joke weaponizes the intelligent design argument against itself. If you accept that life was designed, the designer was incompetent. Every example cited is a real anatomical quirk that only makes sense as a product of incremental evolution, not top-down engineering. The comic essentially argues that evolution is a more flattering explanation than design, because at least evolution has an excuse for bad engineering.

Scientific Context

The examples in the comic are drawn from real biology. The recurrent laryngeal nerve, which travels from the brain down to the heart and back up to the larynx, is a classic example in evolutionary biology of how descent with modification produces suboptimal solutions. In giraffes, this nerve takes a 15-foot detour.