Origins
Explanation
This comic humorously imagines the evolutionary origin of rude behavior.
A professor stands at a chalkboard delivering a lecture on moral philosophy and the evolution of social behavior. The chalkboard text describes what is required for a species to possess "three distinct evolved capacities": awareness of oneself as a moral actor, awareness of other beings as similarly evolved, and understanding of the appropriate range of actions between beings. This is a serious description of the cognitive prerequisites for moral behavior -- the kind of thing you might find in a philosophy or evolutionary psychology textbook.
The punchline is in the caption below: "Scientists now believe that the first 'absolute dick move' evolved approximately 541 million years ago." This places the origin of jerk behavior at the Cambrian explosion -- the period when complex multicellular life first diversified rapidly. The joke is that as soon as organisms evolved enough cognitive sophistication to be aware of each other and understand social norms, the very first thing they did was violate those norms. Being a jerk is presented as one of the oldest and most fundamental evolved behaviors, emerging at the very dawn of complex life. The comic suggests that rudeness is not a modern social failing but a deeply ancient evolutionary feature.