Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

lamarcked

2025-05-11 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
lamarcked
Votey panel for lamarcked
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The comic features a man asking "Dear Evolution" why inherited traits only work at the germline level -- why can't he alter his own body and pass those changes to his kids? Evolution (depicted as an amorphous green blob creature) responds with horror: "Are you insane?"

Evolution then explains what Lamarckian inheritance would actually look like in practice: every regrettable tattoo would be passed on to babies, helicopter moms who believe every bodily and emotional quality manifests in children would lose their minds overnight, and by "night 3 it'd just be an orgy of violence and cannibalism" with those traits being inherited too. The man (Todd) is then confronted: "Is that what you want Todd?! Is it?!" Todd sheepishly admits he was just imagining he could pass on his Star Wars trivia knowledge automatically. Evolution delivers the final zinger: "You know you'd have to mate for that, right?" -- implying Todd is unlikely to reproduce.

The title "lamarcked" is a play on "Lamarck" (Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose theory of evolution proposed that organisms could pass on acquired characteristics to offspring -- e.g., a blacksmith's children inheriting his strong arms) combined with a past-tense verb form suggesting being "marked" or doomed. Lamarckian inheritance has been largely debunked in favor of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics (though epigenetics has revived some limited aspects of the idea).

The humor works by taking the seemingly appealing notion of Lamarckian inheritance and showing its nightmarish implications if applied broadly, then undercutting the whole thing with a double-punchline about the guy being a nerd who just wanted to skip teaching his kids Star Wars trivia -- and who probably isn't going to reproduce anyway.

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