Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

mate

2023-05-28 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
mate
Votey panel for mate
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic features a conversation about evolutionary psychology. A character announces: "I'm a big believer in evolutionary psychology!" and another responds: "Meaning you've read the academic literature?" The first clarifies: "No, meaning when I'm involved in the behavior of other people, I do so by consulting an imagined caveman in my brain."

The conversation continues with someone saying "No more talk, more food!" to parody the imagined caveman's approach. Another character asks something like "Would you like for me to supply you a fool?" and a response about wanting "more food than other males have."

Then someone asks: "Are you trying to mate with me to produce offspring?" The response is something like: "Haha, wait -- that is harsh. Evolution and I part company."

The comic skewers pop evolutionary psychology -- the tendency of non-experts to justify their behavior by appealing to vague notions of what cavemen supposedly did. The character claims to follow evolutionary psychology but admits he's not actually reading the scientific literature; instead, he's just imagining what a caveman would do and using that to guide his social behavior. The punchline reveals the hypocrisy: he's happy to invoke evolution to justify wanting more food or status, but the moment evolutionary logic leads to an uncomfortable conclusion about mating, he suddenly decides evolution doesn't apply to him anymore. It mocks how people cherry-pick evolutionary explanations to justify behaviors they already wanted to engage in.

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