Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

A green creature (representing natural selection personified) approaches a person and says: "Hey, natural selection here. You know how you made the right brain for emotions and the left brain for reason?" The person asks what it is talking about. The creature explains that there are "left brain people" and "right brain people," to which the person responds, "Oh God, Jesus, what's the matter with you?" The creature then explains what actually happened: it made the human brain good at finding patterns, which is a feature, not a flaw. Humans have apparently tried to categorize their brain into neat left/right divisions "in defiance of all common sense, in a desperate effort to understand something that is far too complex for you." When told the concept is too complex for the person's brain, the person fires back that natural selection itself can't even explain how it made the brain — "you're personifying an autonomous natural process... what, are you a ghost or something?" This causes an existential crisis for the green creature, which starts to wonder if it is "a ghost-nymph-like thing" that speaks English and vaguely resembles a person. It realizes the human might be imagining it and that it is "starting to get defensive about it."

The Humor

The comic works on multiple levels. First, it debunks the popular "left brain/right brain" myth — the idea that logical people are "left-brained" and creative people are "right-brained." Natural selection itself shows up to say this is a simplistic misunderstanding of neuroscience, born from the brain's tendency to categorize things into neat patterns. But then the comic turns on itself: the person points out that "natural selection" cannot literally show up as a talking green humanoid, because it is an impersonal process, not a being. This sends the personification of natural selection into an identity crisis, creating a delightful paradox — the comic uses personification to criticize oversimplification, then undermines its own device. The humor is self-referential and philosophically playful.

References

• The left brain/right brain dichotomy is a popular misconception. While certain functions are lateralized, the idea that individuals are dominated by one hemisphere is not supported by neuroscience.
• Natural selection is the mechanism of evolution described by Charles Darwin, an impersonal process with no agency or intention.