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Hey, I’ve heard it argued, defensibly and with citations, that we’re not even the most evolved primate. I’ll posit that the most evolved form of life is either a virus or some single celled organism (depending on your working definition of life), but whichever it is, it’d be the thing with the /shortest/ generational cycle, giving it the most opportunities for exposure to harm and adaptation.
Joyce knows a trick question when she hears it. They should go with Joe, personally, as the specific individual organism as their answer. Joe can argue for real and Joyce can argue ironically, presenting his selection of underwear as a sure sign of the ultimate in evolved taste.
I’m torn between thinking that Prof. Brock wants to hear that because it is, of course, the correct answer, and shows his students are thinking on the right track…or that he wants them to say ‘man’ (or octopus, or a virus, or whatever) so he can crush their petty little souls.
The question is itself not an objective question with an objective answer. “Highly Evolved” is emotional terminology, it’s like asking ‘Best’ without qualifiers-the answer depends on the opinion of the asker.
this makes it not a scientific question, but instead a test of psychology and personality.
Most highly evolved is probably something like a mite. Short generations, and so closely associated with the host organism that it can’t change to a different species of host.
All man has is a inquisitive brain, tool use, and the capacity for language. That makes us EXCEPTIONALLY capable generalists, but also short-cuts us actually genetically adapting to a new environment, as we can more easily kill something furry to steal its coat.
Also, the opportunity for Man’s evolution is about to come to an end. We will, once we get past the moral hurdles, start using gene-tweaking to eliminate anything that is inimical to the individual’s survival, and eventually, start adding improvements in.
I want a stronger lower back and a throat that isn’t at risk of choking. Maybe a tweak that takes the appendix out for good, but leaves the tissue in place to continue to fulfill its secondary purpose. I suspect the women in this crowd would like a coccyx that softens in the last two weeks of pregnancy to make for a less labyrinthine birth canal. Possibly just soften up the entire pelvis.
For starters, it’s a good sign that Joyce knows that something’s amiss.
My take is “highly evolved” is a term far more rooted in Science Fiction and it’s hold on the human imagination than legit biology. With my understanding of what it means to be evolved in practice, Sharks and Crocodilians are more “highly evolved” than humans due to needing so few species-changing mutations to adapt over a much longer period of time than even primates have existed, much less humans. They got it right millions of years ahead of us, and still going strong.
The correct answer is most likely what the Professor defines as the meaning of “highly evolved.”
But even that depends on luck that conditions in their environment remained stable enough or changed within benign/beneficial parameters to allow them to remain relatively unchanged over so long. One big event and you see species that have remained recognisably the same for long periods of years requiring rapid adaptation or disappearing entirely.
I agree with you that it’s an unrealistic question, and hopefully that’s the point the professor is trying to make. Evolution doesn’t have a start or end goal, which is what a lot of people get wrong, it’s a process of genetic material simply finding the best way to replicate itself. The most *well* evolved organism is one that is currently prospering in its niche without needing to adapt, but that’s a fluctuating thing rather than a static observation.
I would assume it meant the species which has undergone the most evolutionary changes over time, in which case I would suspect it’s something that evolves quickly like bacteria.
OTOH, you could argue that while bacteria change quickly, they’ve stayed basically like their distant ancestors and that the most highly evolved group would be the one that had changed the most.
It’s not rooted in Science Fiction, but in pre-scientific classifications. The “great chain of being” with humans as the pinnacle of creation and other creatures organized in steps below dates back to Plato and Aristotle.
According to Google, Chimps are merely more “highly evolved” than humans, not the most highly evolved organism. In actuality, the answer is more likely that every organism are evolved to the same degree.
according to the New Scientist article reporting on the paper, the scientists compared chimpanzee & human genomes to that of their common ancestor (actually they used a macaque genome as a proxy), and found that the chimp genome was more different than the human one.
i couldn’t find the actual paper but i doubt it used the words “more evolved”, let alone “more highly evolved”.
and we can now confirm that the researchers did not use the words “more evolved” or “highly evolved” (or indeed, “evolved”) anyhere in their paper. Bad New Scientist, bad.
instead they talk about “positively selected genes”, which they abbreviate to PSG because that’s a mouthful.
their hypothesis for why there’s been more PSGs in chimps than in humans is interesting, they argue that, for most of the >6My since the two lineages split, chimps have had a significantly larger population (or technically, a larger effective population) than humans, which will usually correlate to rates of genetic innovation.
also it should be noted that PSGs is not the only way for differences to happen between two genomes. it doesn’t take into account deletions, insertions, number of copies, polymorphism, not to mention the epigenome…
…a realization i owe to this more recent article (2019 vs 2007), which reviews the many studies on chimp/human molecular divergence that have been done since. it doesn’t challenge the previous study’s findings but it does provide a sense that the issue is vastly more complicated than that first study might have led one to believe.
Notably, it concludes by saying: “the lack of information on genome populational diversity could impact the total extent of human and chimpanzee interspecies divergence by misinterpretation of polymorphic sequences.”
If I understand things correctly, every living thing currently extant is *equally* evolved in that the actions of evolution have been working on us all for exactly the same length of time. ‘More evolved’ is a nonsense term, so Joyce is correct that it’s a trick question.
It isn’t, maybe, a 30 second dissertation, and Joyce may have some complications with Creationism but a quick search for earliest forms of life, a couple of references to transition fossils and the phylogenetic “tree” will adequately show everything has been evolving since life started and is still evolving QED everything’s equally evolved as everything else. We justvhave different niche to fill.
Working through deconstructing that interpretation: Whatever definition is used, I doubt that anyone using the term means pure chronology from the local origin of life (else the much less obtuse question: when was the origin of life). ex:Two cars set out from Detroit travelling west for two hours. One is travelling at 30 mph, the other is travelling at 13.5 m/s. Which one has expended more stored energy vs. how long have they been travelling?
Unless conditions are remarkably similar, but perfectly slightly different to accomodate the subtle differences between the two cars, they are not equal, not even in how long they have been travelling, since the faster or heavier car will have experience slower time (whichever condition ends up having a bigger impact).
If one really wants to stick with that time definition then we must compute if time travels faster at the equator due to being further from the gravity well, or if it’s slower due to the surface of the earth moving faster due to rotation, as compared to the poles. (all must also account for local variations in surface density over time, and other influencing characteristics.)
That would have been my answer, the most evolved organism is one with the shortest generational cycle combined with the most plastic DNA, so likely some form of virus or bacteria, complicated by the possible argument about viruses possibly not being alive.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I mean in Bob’s Burgers, Linda’s sister contracted “Butts Disease” as you describe it, and spite her many misgivings she made a full recovery.
The classic hard work vs talent debate. By that logic I think Joe has the edge. Walky’s ass will inevitably fade with time, while Joe’s discipline will keep his well maintained for years to come.
Correct. “Highly-evolved” isn’t a thing, because it assumes evolution is directional (i think that’s the right word? “towards a purpose” at any rate), which is an annoyingly common misconception.
That’s pretty much the only way I could conceive of the term having any actual scientific meaning, but even then I have to wonder what, exactly, counts as an iteration.
I could see ‘highly evolved” as a a term for species that are so overfitted to the parameters of their current environment that tiny changes could potentially wipe them out in less than evolutionary timescales.
I don’t think most iterated makes any sense, because number of generations means nothing if no adaptation takes place in all that time. There are species with short generational cycles that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years, during which time whales have evolved from something resembling a shrew.
You raise a valid point about potentially discounting a certain class of data points, but I don’t think it’s a sufficient argument to completely sink iterations as a workable definition. And regardless of _appearing_ unchanged at a casual glance, all species change over time. Even if the environment hasn’t changed in a way encouraging macroscopic changes, species create internal pressures for evolutionary adaptation, as does disease and even just changes in food preferences. The lowly fruit fly, if restrained from iterating with its own kind, may die during mating when paired with a descendant removed by some generations. [sorry, it’s just a reference, not the original study].
supposing it was even possible to quantify “evolution” in that way, i don’t see what such a ranking would tell us. geneticists do think about reproductive period when doing “molecular dating”, but they’re only trying to end up with something like, “this species split from that species X million years ago”, not “this species is X units more evolved than that one”. because that’s not a metric that exists (that i know of).
but honestly, i don’t even see how we would begin to calculate that sort of number.
complex organisms such as humans have evolved immunity systems that randomly generate billions of antibody proteins, and hypermutation in parts of the genome to counter the higher rate of reproduction of microbes/viruses. so… who wins? do we still count one generation of human as equivalent to one generation of bacteria? because those don’t seem commensurate to me.
what about the bacteria in our gut, which go through a vast number of reproductive cycles throughout one animal’s life, how do we count these? their evolution surely affects our fitness as individuals, and as a species. so..?
Aside from saying that it makes other primates better than us, and bacteria better than everything (except maybe viruses) to mentals the anthro-centrists? Absolutely nothing.
anthro-centrists think they’re so reasonable and balanced, but at the first sign of a crisis they’ll immediately turn around and throw in their lot with the anthro-fascists, and throw the rest of us under the bus, and throw up their hands in the agony and throes of scruples and throat-clutching.
The obvious answer is either dolphin or mice: one was smart enough to leave this planet and the other smart enough to create a planet for the sole purpose of figuring out what the Ultimate Question is.
The fact that few people here realized that only proves Professor Brock’s assignment’s effectiveness as a surrogate for deep thought in regard to the concept of evolution.
Well, if you read „Most highly evolved“ as „has mutated most“ and still exists, there’s probably some answer (and it’s not ‚humans‘). Ah, here someone found a lizard with the most dna changes sind dinosaurs: https://www.livescience.com/2396-fastest-evolving-creature-living-dinosaur.html (I didn’t fact check this, so don’t throw it into a serious discussion without checking).
That’s interesting. But it’s the highest molecular evolutionary rate among… amniotes, it seems, probably not even among vertebrates; tuataras are not considered lizards, but the closest surviving relatives of lizards-including-snakes; Sphenodontia, not “Sphehodontia”; and – something the article contradicts itself on – they’re not dinosaurs, not remotely. Birds are dinosaurs. *eyeroll*
It could also just be his intention to get them thinking about how to justify their positions to begin with. Given there’s no actual correct answer and it seems to be pretty early in the course I doubt he’s expecting a deep understanding of the material.
In short its not what animal you pick, but how you make your case. Of course I’m sure the optimal answer is to point out that the question is flawed and properly explain how.
Duh. The answer is birds or other equatorially mountain dwelling species. i.e. what lives atop Mount Chimborazo.
Alternatively: which species consumes the most mind altering chemicals as measured vs. baseline neurochemistry when exposed to a neutral diet.
I’d vote for tardigrades bc they can SURVIVE IN SPACE (and pretty much anywhere else from volcanos to antartica), you get to say “moss piglet” and “little water bear”, and most of all because they lasted through ALL FIVE mass extinctions.
Interesting that Joyce apparently understands evolutionary theory enough to know that this is a trick question– which is more than I can say for, like, at least half of America. Dina, by way of Becky, is clearly rubbing off on her.
Now that I think about it, realizing WHY this question cannot have a singular, clear and cut answer may very well be a great learning experience, if not a way to distinguish deeper thinkers among the rest of the students (analogous to how classes on Newtonian mechanics are often made particularly difficult to weed out weaker physicists and engineers).
It’s a question that makes you think. It’s a question that forces YOU to ask questions. There is no “correct answer”. He could be trying to see what you believe and how you come to that conclusion. You could say man, but how do you build on that? How did you come to it. What parameters did YOU give the question?
Evidently, a response that incorporates those kinds of realizations is exactly what Professor Brock wants to use as a surrogate to identify the deeper thinkers in his class.
We think our highest evolutionary traits are our brains but it’s more like a combination of things. Being Bipedal, Having thumbs and the ability to sweat are HUGE aspects to why we’re such a good animal. If you get rid of even one of those features we would Careen down the food chain.
Well, we would have before. Brain has kind of taken centre stage now that we’ve adapted enough tech to offset dependence on the others. As is currently being shown, the question left is if we can survive ourselves long enough to overcome disease and planet killer/stellar/galactic/universal events.
One day the humans lost the ability to sweat, that was when the lion attacked…and then all the lions were promptly killed because the inability to sweat has no effect on your ability to use firearms.
We’d basically have to invent cooling devices that humans keep with them all the time because with how our bodies metabolize we generate way too much heat to NOT sweat. Like people would constantly die of heat stroke.
Honestly, barring an extinction event the likes of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs humans will probably find a way to persist. And being honest even then most extinction level events will be able to be forseen in such a way that some people (though not all) will still persist, breed and humanity will probably continue. Honestly a scenario that wipes us out for good is unlikely.
No, the thumb remains the most important. The only reason our feline overlords tolerate us is we can open those cans of cat food for them. No thumbs? It’s over.
Tardigrades are bottom-tier trash and their skill choices make no sense for the environment they play in. A single snail of all things can kill thousands of tardigrades every minute. Their resistances to radiation, heat, and cold virtually never come into play. They don’t cooperate with each other in any way and are in fact cannibalistic. If by any chance they find themselves in space or another extreme situation, they can only survive there until the situation changes. They cannot gain xp or spawn new players at all under those circumstances.
Tardigrades are literally one of the worst builds in the game.
All organism’s are equally evolved to best fit their niche until an organism is no longer the best fit for its particular niche, a human is no more highly evolved than an ant as we belong in different niches
Ants are way more evolved. They have had vastly more iterations to adapt to this environment and way of life and have been around since the Cretacious.
Arguably, though, we’re good at changing the niches to suit us. Of course, we’ve done that so much that the niches are going to take their revenge and destroy us.
Not without a useful definition, but then no word or phrase is. So either the students fall into the trap of operating under false pretenses (naiveté), or they derail themselves with a search for a workable definition without knowing if it is what Dr. Brock meant.
I’m a briefs-wearer, I like the feel more, but am often envious of the wide myriad of patterns and colors available to boxers-wearers. This is one such case.
For me it’s task dependant. Soldiering, outdoorsing, climbing etc… boxer-briefs. Sleep nude. Casual hang about, has to be boxers. Honestly if it wasn’t for environmental, industrial and even daily standard hazards, and inter-personal hygeine in shared spaces, we’d all be better off nude. Largo has that much right. However, we’re wrapped up in so much social, cultural and relgious toxicity that we’d go insane before we could transition at this point anyways.
while we’re talking biology, i’ve heard it said by some “distance-running is our superpower” paleontologist that no known human society exists that doesn’t have some sort of underwear.
and the reason, he claimed, is that underwear was first invented to tether the jiggly parts while running.
i mean, like, maybe? i’m not sure if by underwear he also meant, like bras or if he was only concerned with penises? maybe he just assumed that running down prey was mostly done by penis-havers for most of human history? he didn’t linger very long on that point, so my guess is that was just a silly pet theory of his.
in fairness, he didn’t speak of either loincloths or whatever might be the generic word for a chest binding thing. i’m not even sure he used the word underwear, but i guess he must’ve because i recall thinking that it remained vague as to whether that included boob-containment technology or only dick-strapping implements.
so, because i’m exceptionally idle today i’ve gone and located and transcribed the relevant bit of the episode. So the speaker is called Daniel Liberman, “Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology”, and here is my transcription. this is a live conference, so sometimes he’s obviously showing slides, and also i have no sources to provide, DWI
[30:50]
finally, i think that running can help us understand some human universals. there’s been a lot of efforts over the years to try to find out what’s common to all societies, right?
so for example, all societies cook their food, we all have marriage, we all have mother-in law jokes, we all have music— but it turns out that one human universal is that every culture in the world has underwear. we all have some sort of modesty accoutrement.
there’s lots of different kinds, some of them are more intersting than others.
but i would argue that, maybe, this also has something to do with running, because when you run, you’re creating substantial accelerations of your body, right? running is actually jumping from one leg to another, that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re running, biomechanically.
and of course, when you jump, you’re accelerating your centre of mass up; and then as you fall, your centre of mass is accelerating down, you’re going up and down, and up and down, and up and down.
and all of you remember high school physics, right? remember Newton’s second law, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. So, when this guy’s body’s acccelerating downward, everything that’s not tied down is gonna accelerate up; and when he’s accelerating up, everything that’s not tied down, like his penis, is gonna accelerate… down. it happens with breasts too, right, anything that’s not tied down.
so i would argue that when we started running, millions of years ago, and we had to run really long distances, all that jiggling and flapping was perhaps a little bit uncomfortable, and so we figured out how to tie things down.
This is the oldest known underwear in the archeological record, it’s from an egyptian tomb.
so the benefit of underwear is that it prevents some of that annoying jiggling.
(…) but of course everything has tradeoffs, there’s costs and benefits to everything, and the benefits may be less jiggling, the cost of course is chafing.
(…) in short, i would like to argue that nothing in biology including jiggling penises and whatever, including the marathon, makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Already familiar with the superpower theory (sweat and the ability to find/transport water is amazing), I am going to attack the underwear theory. The problem being that by definition, to have underwear, one must first have over-wear. Since there are many tribes that wear nothing more than a thong or loin cloth, they _obviously_ aren’t wearing underwear, as there is nothing to be worn under the loincloth. Unless he was proposing that primitive tribes all had access to victoria’s secret?
Ooff. Comment noted. I did intentionally avoid such earlier in my take and then intentionally used primitive later to actually mean ‘early’, but left far too little to differentiate the intention. mea culpa.
Didn’t Joyce grow up in a house full of brothers? Surely she’s seen dudes in their underwear before. Saw pictures of men in catalogs? No one is that pure. Or is it Joe in underwear she’s having the issues with? That makes sense, then.
The Westermarck effect is not well substantiated. Shooting from the hip, an equally valid theory is that the reason why sublings don’t often find each other attractive is that in growing up together they have an established history of irritating the shit out of each other, as they were each other’s practice board for learning societal social norms. (i.e. they know what not to do to irritate others because they already did it to their siblings, and learned the hard way, what not to do.) This would also substantiate why marriages are progressively failing at higher rates in societies with lower birth rates as children are growing up with fewer siblings and less exposure to how to treat each other appropriately. As a result, people enter into marriage and then go about pissing each other off as they can’t be bothered to make each other feel sufficiently loved to sustain the marriage.
Those dudes in their underwear were related to her though. I’ve seen my mom in a bra but obviously I’m not gonna react the same way as I would if a completely unrelated woman of the same age had her tits out in front of me.
Indeed, Danny doesn’t see Joe in a sexual way, and presumably, even if Joyce’s siblings were casual about clothing, she wouldn’t necessarily take much notice. This is especially true since most of the men we’ve seen her to be attracted to (Ethan, Joe, and Jacob) are built quite differently than dudes in Joyce’s family, judging by John and Hank, even before you get into family relations. Even outside of squick, they’re probably not her type.
It is entirely possible that her family was the sort that didn’t allow even small children to be out of their bedroom or bathroom without being fully clothed.
Can’t find the specific strip, but I wanna say Joyce mentioned early on that she had her own bathroom growing up because was (so far as Hank and Carol knew) the only girl in the family, so I’m guessing Hank and Carol had strict rules about who was allowed to be in what states of undress where.
That or it just means their house had enough bathrooms for that to be possible. My parents would’ve had to have moved us if they wanted to do that.
Assuming she did see any of her brothers in their underwear, most people generally don’t find that sexy compared to someone they’re not related to in their underwear.
Fantasies like that are why I’m cracking. Not that I have any hope of forming a healthy relationship at this point, and one night stands and sex work leave me emotionally more bereft than doing nothing. People always say they’re not all like that, but seem to forget that it’s _me_ doing the looking, and I have the track record of the demon sphere in my past associations.
Has anyone else worked out the solution to the fallacies and unsupported jumps in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus?
Your pen is slipped indeed. Though I have to admit that she strikes me as looking more like Shortpacked Amber than Joyce. Maybe it’s that the shirtpocket looks like a Shortpacked nametag.
Isn’t it weird how accidental and/or random patterns can be interpreted by the conscious mind as reflecting their basest desires or repressed fantasies?
As for the question….sounds like a trick question. How are we defining ‘most evolved’? By most generations? Quality of mutations (and what do we mean by quality?) Most specimens? Most advanced specimens (and how do you define that?)
I’d think it would be the one that best adapts to its specific environment but that depends on what environment you mean and what creatures are in it.
See that makes more sense. I was wondering in what context you were in your underwear in front of a semi antagonistic acquaintance, completely oblivious to their attraction towards you
Same. The boys floors on my hall weren’t necessarily stinky, but they had that heavy, hard to breathe air that makes your brain say “yeah no this place stinks.”
Also if they say humans they are gonna fail. Humanity is itself a vain conceit. We are all machines. By that logic the most advanced organism can’t be man. Way not to pay attention to the class lecture.
The most advanced doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s advanced. It’s like being the hottest ice cube, the wettest desert, The best Micheal Bay Transformers.
You could argue the Ocean is the wettest desert, a sparse expanse with minimal drinkable water. Not by the traditional definition but you could make the case.
The main problem with that is by definition deserts get very little precipitation and while I’m no expert on oceanic climates, I would imagine they get a fair amount of rain. Perhaps certain parts of the ocean could be defined as a desert, but definitely not as a whole.
But at that point, you’re just changing what things mean to fit your needs, by that definition I could argue that my pillow is a desert, so long as I choose to define a desert as a soft thing which a person rests his head on. Of course, my example is much more extreme than yours, but the point stands that if you want to argue that the ocean is a desert, you must first argue to change the definition of the word “desert”, which can be done of course.
Yeah. I think ‘a desert is a sparse expanse with little to no drinking water’ would fall under bending the definition rather than breaking it, but yeah.
I gotta back Thag on this one. As Morpheus said, some rules can be bent, others can be broken. Given that antarctica is also a desert, I don’t think it’s an indefensible stretch to classify some sections of ocean as desert. All oceans? definitely not. But some sections of ocean definitely get ridiculously small amounts of rain.
Then there’s also desert oceans, or hypoxic ocean where the water doesn’t carry enough oxygen to support aerobic life. Fortunately this rarely happens in our atmosphere except for some well documented cases of whole villages being suffocated or industrial accidents. https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.795
In school I learned that “desert” technically just means it has very little precipitation per year, and that Antarctica is technically a desert. It doesn’t get much snow at all, it just doesn’t melt either (aside from climate change). According to that class, being hot and dry is just part of the colloquial definition.
So I’d pick Antarctica as the wettest (and also coldest) desert. Woo!
The answer to the class question is that evolution is not a direction along which you can advance. That’ll be fun for fundie-educated Joyce, where humans are made in God’s image, and in charge of the earth, and so on.
Props for nailing the south pole desert, but since the temperature there precludes water from ‘wet’ting, I suspect it would fail the wetness definition for most mentals.
It’s a body design that has evolved a few times (but not even that many, like 5 times), mostly in anomura and exclusively in crustaceans, so though it’s a cool word (the coiner whereof made it super-memeable by defining it as “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab”) it’s really just one of many instances of evolution converging
my presentation would be about ten seconds to state that the organism in question cannabis, and the rest would be me standing there silently while The Next Episode plays on the boombox behind me.
I mean making bad decisions has nothing to do with Evolution. In fact, the most highly evolved organism doesn’t even have to be smart. It just needs to survive and thrive in its environment. We could light the world on fire, but if we found a way to continue living on it, our evolution was successful.
Seconded. I’m proven fit since I’ve got kids, but their other parents were the worst decisions of my life. Make no mistake, my kids were not mistakes. I’ve been involved in zero pregnancy scares. But their other parents? Well, there’s reasons why I don’t date and had best remain single.
How’s that line go?… “fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice, and what kind of a fuckin’ moron does that *TWICE* AND does it WORSE the second time?”
Correct. Except that intelligence is actually a huge game-changer in evolution, for it allows us to gain new skills and abilities without having to wait thousands or even millions of years to evolve the hard way.
yeah, but there are other ways to adapt quickly, for instance by reproducing very fast and mutating a lot. i don’t see why intelligence would be an inherently better evolution than other strategies.
also, saying that human brains are a good evolutionary strategy feels like an ad-hoc hypothesis. It so happens that we belong to a species whose population has skyrocketed over the last few thousand years thanks to technology humans were able to develop via brains.
but that demographic explosion was not a given until we got good at domesticating crops around 10,000 BCE. Until then, estimates i’ve read place worldwide human population at 10K to 30K, based on genetic analysis. i don’t think that’s particularly impressive, and i’m wary of any big claims about big brains that can only claim 10,000 years of evolutionary success. that’s nothing. Maybe some amphibian evolved some skin pigment or venom or digestive enzyme at some point that made its population go boom for a few thousand years? how is that less of a “game-changer” than having a big brain, unless we’re being a bit anthropocentric? (and there’s nothing wrong with being anthropocentric as long as we admit it.)
I think we should probably hold off for another couple million years before we call human brains an evolutionary success story.
(we do most likely hold the forever record for species having the greatest impact on their environment in the shortest amount of time, but that’s not quite the same question.)
I didn’t say human brains necessarily, I just said intelligence.
The ability to prepare for dangers before they are encountered may not be sufficient for being the “most evolved” (as bad as a germ that is), but it sure does help for survival.
That, and the consequences of natural cycles we are normally subject to can be averted by being aware of them, so there’s that.
Bad Boys was a fun movie and The Rock is good, tight action movie with a really good cast, its even better if you think of it as an unofficial Bond movie
So its not like he can’t do decent movies, just goes for the money. Bit like Adam Sandler I guess
Plump. Bubbly. Spherical. Toight. Toned. Buff. Stacked. Packed/Packin’. I mean, the list goes on, butt I gotta disagree on it being fat. I mean, unless he _never_ squats or walks, which is demonstrably false.
Noice job on the artwork again Yoto. You’re a scholar and a gentleperson.
It all depends. A lot of people who build a lot of muscle will, in fact, still build a healthy layer of fat over their musculature. One can absolutely have a fat ass while being very muscular and somewhat cut. I’d argue it’s actually the more optimal way of forming muscle, rather than what’s considered show muscles, which is what body builders and movie stars often build.
Oh yeah for sure. Fat’s got a lot of uses beyond energy storage and insulation. But I expect Joe is aiming more for show muscles than raw strength, though it be a nice benefit.
Joes smart. Theres plenty of research, anecdotal and data that shows that working your legs and upper body produces more gains than working your upper body alone
if I’m given something like this question when I go back to school (which holy shit I’m going to be a university senior in a couple months) I would absolutely spend the entire class talking about how highly evolved really doesn’t make sense because it falls more into guided evolution/acting like there’s a big goal to evolution, as opposed to evolution “just” being a really complicated iterative process that responds to environmental and genetic factors as they appear. everything is evolved; nothing is highly evolved, because the concept doesn’t mean anything.
Not necessarily. I mean, any species that manages to get its genetic code frozen and thrown into orbit around a black hole until it devolves from Hawking Radiation is technically the “most evolved” species if the only qualifier is making its genes survive as long as possible.
However, the Gene View of Evolution, formulated by Richard Dawkins, is rather useful because it can help us understand evolutionary situations in ways that are otherwise not obvious through other frameworks.
And that is the problem with some specific academics, and may be more prevalent in the arts due to their inherent subjectivity. It is however not an implicit problem with acadamia per-se. Once you enter peer-review, you become free(r) of individual bias and more subject to rigour concerning procedure than result.
You have my sympathy in being paired with a shit supervisor. Although arguably, what she may have been trying to teach you was how to argue a point effectively, which is harder to do when you don’t personally support that position. Since it seems you got your master’s while doing so, it appears that you learned said lesson, possibly while not realizing you had done so.
ok so I agree with the people who say that no organism actually qualifies because each develops to fill their own niche, but my brain still went with “peacock mantis shrimp”.
So long as not too many people here continue to reach these not so obvious kinds of insights, Professor Brock’s assignment will prove effective identifying the deepest thinkers in his class and precisely determining the extent of their aptitude in biology.
To get a better picture of where I am coming from, this related to the reason why many higher level aptitude tests are designed so that only the most skilled takers will be able to actually finish them within the alloted time.
By the way the answer is Crocodilllians. Crocodiles and Aligators haven’t evolved in millions of years…because they don’t have to. They’ve basically been perfect since time and memorial.
I mean it depends. If we ARE viewing evolution as an endgame, isn’t reaching a point where you simply no longer need to evolve mean you’ve basically completed your evolution? Reached the highest peak of your evolution early? Again the question is open ended so I can insert my own definition on what “highly evolved” means.
Because it’s been *ages* since I got to liquify a deceased equus via repetive compression:
If one were to *cough* /nudge/ insert their definition (aka data, aka DNA) *wink, nudge*, then they were sufficiently (know what I mean? know what I mean?) fit {hand wobble, nudge, wink}, i.e. highly enough evolved. (say no more, say no more.)
That’s not necessarily true.The idea of not evolving in lots of years and still having multiple species just means those species evolved long ago. But I honestly havent’ researched my bold claim much.
From my (quick wikipedia) research, the earliest described fossils of the genus Alligator is about 37 million years old. Crocodylus, Mecistops, Caiman and Gavialis seem to be much younger, 12 million, 7.5 million, 14 million and 5 million respectively. I don’t know about Paleosuchus, wikipedia says it diverged 30 million years ago but not whether or not that was the extant genus or an ancestor. Osteolaemus seems to be late miocene/early pliocene, so around 5 million for them too
Tomistoma is like 50 million years old, which makes it the oldest extant crocodilian genus as far as my limited research tells me.
All of those genuses have continued to evolve and develop for the record. Change and mutations are inevitable, but it is impressive how reliable the base crocodilian form is
on the other hand, crocodilian diversity is looking pretty sorry now compared to what it was in its heyday.
as a Common Descent Podcast listener, i feel obligated to counter any claim for crocodilian superiority with snakes.
In this case, it’s noteworthy that snakes also have been doing their body type for a while (though not for nearly as long), except they’re crazy diverse.
Everyone here is wrong, both the people that say the answer is nothing because that’s not how evolution and natural selection work, and the people who are saying stuff like crabs, sharks, or sea sponges.
It’s an embedded joke for smbc fans and/or the Weinersmiths (should I be so lucky that they read my words). Mr. Weinersmith often jokes about people thinking he’s the XKCD guy because *that guy* is smart and cool and they both have four letter comics that often feature intellectual (or pseudo-intelllectual) jokes. It often reads to me like, even though he readily stands on his own, Weinersmith might claim to have to try harder and stretch to see farther, because he’s in the company of such giants. In reality they’re both awesome people doing awesome things while *also* putting smiles on a lot of faces.
Well, we know from a witness that Joe’s best quality is his stamina, so it won’t be a problem on his end. Joyce might get overwhelmed, but it’s possible it would be in such a good way that she’d decide to skip class and carry on for longer. So I think your question answers itself, but might not be good for their grades.
I see a lot people answering the highly-evolved question with animals. No love for the other kingdoms of organisms, like plants? I once heard in passing (and never fact-checked) that strawberries have much longer DNA sequences than humans. Is that worth something? (Also, I like trees.)
Humans are endothemrs/”warm-blooded”, we maintain a constant metabolic temperature. Takes a lot of energy and behavioral work, but it means our cellular machinery just needs to be tuned for that temperature. Cold-booded animals and plants need to be able to work across a wide range of temperatures without that kind of cheating, so they need more genes to make more enzymes that can work in different conditions. Kind of like an electric hybrid car where the gas engine has one speed, ‘generator’, vs. a gas car with a complicated transmission.
I actually considered saying Kudzu vines because if human died, Kudzu vines would absolutely take over the Americas and probably every other country they’re in. Regardless of how many animals eat them I feel like they’d outgrow that and keep growing.
I personally have no specific answer because, not only do I not know where to even start evaluating that, the whole concept of there being a hierarchy where some living things evolved “higher” than others I find… really icky.
That’s worth nothing, because large genomes consist mostly of junk. Over half of our own genomes consists of retrovirus corpses in all stages of decay, most of the rest of copy errors, and most of the rest after that of broken genes.
mmm that’s a bit of an outdated understanding, i believe?
non-coding DNA is now understood to have a regulatory effect on the probability of genes getting transcribed, which might seem wasteful if DNA is seen as analogous to a computer algorithm deterministically generating an organism, as early geneticists thought, but makes more sense if we accept that probabilistic (“stochastic”) processes occur all the time everywhere in nature, from the macro level of evolution to the micro level of cell biochemistry. then we can start to see how stochastic expression elegantly explains why genomes seem so chaotic.
i’m not a biologist though, much less a geneticist. i just like the story this seems to tell about the hubris of reductionism and simplistic metaphors ^^
That’s actually a myth. The essential context was missing when it the media reported the discovery that we only use 10% of our brains at a time on average.
You actually DON’T want to use 100% of your brain at a time. This is what is referred to as a seizure.
I feel like we should form a club. Not like a social group per-se. More like transformers or power rangers or Voltron, but as a large fulcrumatic levered mass of destruction. I feel like we could accomplish a lot together.
All of those are human and fall within intraspecific variation. If you disregard bias towards our own species the correct answer is probably a Mandrill’s. They’ve got the most developed ornamentation that I am aware of.
That said I can’t say this is a topic I have much experience with, an evolutionary specialist with greater knowledge of posterior development may have a different take
You may be on to something. Setting aside the pseudoscientific notion of the environment having a “mind” or “feelings” and other nonsense, there is much merit to thinking of the environment as a living thing in terms of what defines a living thing; namely, their ability to grow, develop, acquire energy, remove waste and reproduce.
Their ability to reproduce is due to their pioneer species going elsewhere to start new environments. Although I agree it does differ from reproduction of cells in that the newly formed environment will not have it’s development guided by any form of transmitted information present in those species.
But the moon was stillborn. If we’re working on a gaia “living earth” hypothesis, we aren’t certain we’ve propagated life to another body yet. Quite the opposite so far (to our limited understanding). I’m pretty sure the gaia hypothesis is taking about the living earth as chiefly being the biosphere, rather than (as Yoda put it) “this crude matter” at her core.
Ah, The Tragedy of the Commons. Beings that act in their own self interest can easily wind up making themselves and everyone worse off, regardless of their intentions.
Ah, the Tragedy of the Commons. Invented from no evidence and used to justify privatizing common land that had, contrary to the supposed tragedy, been managed for mutual benefit for centuries or even longer. But those who could buy up the no longer public land could become even richer.
It’s not that there aren’t cases where the basic idea does apply of course, but the original one that it was based on was complete nonsense. Quite possibly deliberately so.
Whaatt? Rich people are assholes who would fuck over others for a buck? Say it ain’t so!
And of course the commons wasn’t *un-owned*, but was owned in a sense that was not recognized under the extant legal structure of the time. It was (as you point out) being shared and cared for by the local community, but that didn’t impart legal ownership. (Sorry, this is all just a bad attempt at shouting *preach*).
The Tragedy of the Commons is from the title of an essay written in 1968 by Hardin. That essay was an argument for the need of managing common property, and was misconstrued by people who used it as an argument for privatising. In any case, 1968 is a long time after the Enclosures movement.
Hardin chise his hypothetical example because of its prior use by Lloyd on a published lecture from 1837, which is also after the Enclosures movement. Lloyd seems to have used it as a hypothetical example to clarify his discussion of a point about unmanaged exploitation of a common resource, an early insight into the economics of goods that are rival but not excludible. He might have had a secret agenda of supporting continued enclosures, but the proponents of e.g. the highland clearances didn’t bother to cite Lloyd they way that 1970s and 1980 privatises alluded to Hardin. In any case, throwing shade on the phrase and the analysis behind it by attributing dishonest motives and incorrect dates to either Hardin or Lloyd is sketchy.
Real commons were, of course, not or seldom unmanaged. Traditional owners were aware of the danger of over-grazing and other misuses like it, and had customs to control it. Just as Hardin was advocating.
For background, enclosures of common land in England go back at least to 1604, and the great Enclosures Act was 1773, well before Lloyd. Enclosures did continue at least until 1914, though.
Hardin, who coined they actual phrase “The Tragedy of the Commons” and was the writer whose paper the privatisers alluded to in their arguments, actually argued against the misuse of his work, and said that he wished he had titled his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”.
In the essay, the unmanaged commons is a hypothetical construction used to clarify and abstract point. The lack of evidence that such commons actually existed is not important. It’s like a word problem in trigonometry — it doesn’t actually matter whether there actually is a person who wants to determine the height of a tree: that’s just a hypothetical example to clarify a point about similar triangles.
I’ve really been in an ass mood today and god damnit, super firm asses you can bounce stuff off of is really hot. (I’m also in the mood for seeing a booty get a hearty smack).
Lots of people read Terry Pratchett, so I’m sure a non-insignificant number of people would answer “cockroach”. But in all probability it’s just the flu (cue NOFX)
Oh no i mean the read one, like the one that can live up to 5000 or so years and revert back into its “baby state” whenever it is injured in order to heal itself.
Which is some sci-fi shit but made real (possibly through the wish of some marine biologist)
Yeah, guessing it’s possible he either is just waking up/too annoyed with her to really think about it, or if he is still so convinced she’s too good for him.
Remember, Joyce: If this ‘highly evolved’ thing means anything, surely your biological needs come secondary to the control of your higher intelligence?
I challenge you to deliver a presentation saying Dolphins are more evolved and expand on that bit from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy as the basis of your assertion. I suspect that if you present something sufficiently plausible-sounding, you’ll get credit for effort!
“When you get right down to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago. No different. Our DNA hasn’t changed substantially in a hundred thousand years. We’re still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we’ve evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the f***ing jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.”
every species in the world has been evolving for the same amount of time, the bacteria living off of iron in deep in the Earth’s crust, human beings, and everything in between are ALL descended from the same self replicating cell that got put together from some proteins and lipid bubbles 3.9 billion years ago. Technically you can even say some random sample of brewers yeast is “more” evolved than we are because since I started typing this it went through a few generations that will take a long-lived organism like a human 60 years to catch up with.
To be fair, that is a trick question that depends entirely on what your qualifiers for ‘highly evolved’ mean.
Do you mean it doesn’t particularly evolve all that much because it is already highly evolved? ‘Cause like, crocodiles and alligators have had their whole design down for a very long time.
Do you mean it has many many suitable adaptions or forms? Because we’ve got cats and dogs for that.
Do you mean it has evolved many many many times? Because bacteria, algae, viruses, fungi etc. evolve through inevitable mutation near constantly.
Do you mean what has the highest chance of survival in a new environment entirely regardless of where it is? Because that’d probably go to like rats as they adapt super quick.
It is only when you base your qualifiers specifically on things man can do that man is the answer and we’re not unique in many ways we claim to be. Animals have complex communication we just don’t understand. Animals have social skills and the ability to learn from mistakes. Animals have intelligence and empathy. They can play and do things for artistic reasons and recognise friends.
It IS a trick question, yes. The average person is likely to reply “Humans” and point to our intelligence, our technology, our culture and other creations. And to be fair, these are all amazing and wondrous creations. But evolution isn’t like a ladder or linear progression from least evolved to most evolved. It’s more like a highly complex, interlocking web, and some organisms which we might think of as being absurdly primitive have what are essentially superpowers to us. For instance, did you know that lobsters are effectively immortal unless killed? They don’t develop senescence (the fancy term for growing old); they just keep on getting bigger and bigger with no loss in strength or reproductive prowess. The only thing that holds them back is that eventually they get SO big that their natural biological processes aren’t equipped for dealing with such a big lobster and they basically get crushed to death when they can’t molt properly.
Every single organism on Earth that is alive today has been constantly evolving since the first of their species emerged. If they haven’t changed (much) from their prehistoric ancestor, it means that their current evolutionary state is still excellent at handling the life conditions they must live under. Ironically, we humans could actually reach a stage where we stop evolving because we instead rely on technology and cybernetics to plug the gap. (For example, if climate change continues and the world gets ever more hotter, it’s likely that people will resort to artificial cooling like air conditioners instead of simply evolving to better tolerate hotter temperatures through more efficient sweating or other mutations that allow us to lose heat faster.)
Thus far, less than 10% of everyone here have answered with any insight effectively identifying the purpose of the assignment. Thus far, it proves as an effective surrogate for the deepest thinkers in regard to biology.
If there is any “reward” to anyone, it goes to Professor Brock. It is proof that his assignment is effective as a tool for rooting out the deepest thinkers in his class. Or otherwise challenging then as an excellent intellectual excercise.
If I were given this assignment, I would insist that my lab partner and I spend an entire weekend constructing costumes of the news anchors from Futurama just so I could shout, “EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!”
Doesn’t matter if it is a trick question or not, what does matter is how long the presentation is supposed to be. If they have to give a two minute presentation, or a ten minute presentation on then it will only take so long to prepare.
That question is meaningless. If that is NOT the answer, then, knowing Brock is a transhumanist, the answer is going to be Siri or Deep Blue or some shit.
I suspect the correct answer is that “most highly evolved organism” is a highly subjective idea, and one tinted with human-centric bias. It’s a common misconception that evolution’s goal is to make people, to make us. Which means we’d be the most evolved.
Evolution doesn’t work like that, it’s about adapting to your environment. If I’d have to pick something, I’d pick something that’s hardly evolved for millions of years. Sharks and turtles and crocodiles are very well adapted to their environment. They existed when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and they exist now. Their continued existence is threatened by human activity though. The cockroach is far more resilient, and predates the dinosaurs. They will likely survive long after humans are gone. The tardigrade is even older and more relient. Maybe the tardigrade is the most highly-evolved organism.
At the same time, I don’t want to discount the emergent properties of sentience. Tardigrades are resilient, they have survival of the species well figured out. Would I rather be a tardigrade, though? Tardigrades aren’t aware of evolution or natural selection, they cannot ponder what it might mean to be the most highly-advanced organism. Not only can’t they sing, they cannot appreciate song, or art, or science, or philosophy. They cannot fathom the cuteness of a kitten or the majesty of a starlit sky. It would be nice to have the ability to fly like a bird, but I wouldn’t give up sentience for it.
I doubt the professor is looking for a specific answer anyway. He just wants the student to give a thoughtful answer.
I think you might be confusing sentience with conscience, or self-awareness, or some other word to describe the unique experience-of-being-me-ness of humans?
it’s not a word i use, but the way wikipedia defines it sounds to me like that’s also not what Jason was going for? but idk maybe you go by a different definition i’m not aware of
I had always read and heard that word to describe beings of human-like intelligence/consciousness. If it doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, that’s annoying because I don’t know that another word does, and we should have a word for this. “Conscience” is too tied up in morality, “self-awareness” is too vague, “sapience” does have potential though.
That said, on the wikipedia page for sentience, it says: “In science fiction, the word ‘sentience’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘sapience’, ‘self-awareness’, or ‘consciousness’.” So the usage is maybe not wrong, and it’s just a different usage of the word? I feel like most of the time when I use this word in this context people understand what I mean, so until we get a better one I’ll probably keep using this one. Though “sapient” could work too. I might take it out for a spin someday, see how it feels.
that’s fair, my experience with the word “sentient” is in the context of anti-speciesism/veganism discourse where it’s usually used as a shorthand for “animals whose subjective experience of sensation (including pain) we have no reason to think differs essentially from our own” based on anatomy etc.
I hadn’t realized that word was used differently elsewhere, so thanks for enlightening me and sorry for the nitpick, i did enjoy reading your meditation =)
the problem with the question is that we even think that evolution is somehow cumulative, that there’s any sense that whatever exists now has been honed and perfected by millions of years of trial-and-error.
i think it’s worthwhile to try and see “evolution” as less of a process, because it’s just too tempting to see current organisms as the consequence, the end-result of that process.
Rather, “evolution” is really just a synonym for “history”. evolution is just, “this happened, and then this happened, and this happened next”.
Any group of individuals of any species, at any given point in the history of life, was adapted to their environment just fine. they weren’t early versions of what their descendants were eventually going to look like, that’s backwards logic. They weren’t somehow bound to fail, or bound to prosper, or bound to evolve dramatically, that’s just what it looks like from the point of view of a species with an exceptional taste for telling coherent stories.
also, when we talk about evolution we look at entire groups over millions of years, and that makes it easy to forget what evolution looks like on the ground, namely: it doesn’t. it’s not there. it’s an oversimplification for the purpose of drawing complicated genealogical trees. even “species” don’t actually exist, only lineages. are you “more evolved” than your grandma for having started to exist two generations later? no. no, you ungrateful punk.
As generations pass, some things are gained while other things are lost. The name of the game is variation, not progress.
So, “who is the most evolved” is like saying “who has had the most history”. and i think we should be skeptical of someone asking either question.
Well, the only way we can really discern species is between groups of organisms. Officially, organisms are of different species if their genetics are so different that they are unable to reproduce with each other.
Not really officially. That’s more the pop science definition.
There are whole bunches of ways it breaks and it’s not even really a good way of thinking about the concept, since it leads to errors.
Basically species (like the higher orders of categorization) are artificial constructions we place around groups of organisms based on our understanding of their differences. Unable to reproduce is a good rule of thumb for many, but doesn’t even apply to asexually reproducing organisms and gets plenty fuzzy even with many closely related species that could interbreed, but don’t normally do so. Ring species, chronospecies. Canids. Horses/donkeys/mules. Tigers and lions.
It’s all a mess.
it should become obvious that “species” are abstractions when you ask yourself the question: “who was the first individual to no longer belong to (say) Homo erectus but count as Homo heidelbergensis?” clearly there will be no single answer. This is what thejeff has called a chronospecies: a species defined by arbitrary thresholds in time though there was no discontinuity from generation to generation in the actual populations.
yeah, the concept of species is wild! look it up Wagstaff
Evolved can just mean most acclimated to its environment, which would imply something that has remained recognizable for what it is for a really long time, like sharks… or a form that multiple evolutionary paths of evolved toward, like crabs (seriously there is a word for species becoming more crab like overtime, Carcinisation).
To be a successful organism, be small, smart, fast, breed profusely and be willing to eat anything. If you can get just three of those, you’re probably doing pretty well.
Giant panda are the absolute suckiest. Apparently, the reason they’re so hard to breed in captivity is because the females don’t go into estrus unless they’re harassed by the male.
You know, I call bullshit on Mother Nature being this nurturing toga-wearing sweet lady like in Captain Planet. As far as I’m concerned she is a perpetually drunk Mad Scientist in a labcoat creating life forms for shits and giggles.
Spite being carnivores, they restrict themselves to only eating bamboo; and of that; only a specific kind of bamboo.
Of the bamboo they eat, only 2% is ever digested. The rest of it only serves to create routine assault to their alimentary canals.
As a result of poor nutrition and other factors, they really don’t have the energy to waste on attempting reproduction (not to mention the fact that among males, the size of a particular organ poses a special kind of problem in that regard.
Even if a female managed to have a baby, she’d probably kill it immediately, simply because she’s never seen one before.
All in all, had they been allowed to die, the Giant Pandas would have gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago.
Or Viruses, depending on whether they’re considered organisms
Was my thought to that the “most evolved” could be judged based off the most steps of evolution, in which case the shortest generational time rules over all
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except for Becky, who will say WIMMIN
come ON what’s wrong with classic white with red hearts
or
silk boxers with Eeyore
Whatever happened to solid colored boxers as an option.
Yes, I know I’m boring. I’ve made peace with that.
All the cool kids have boxers with the Mandelbrot set.
I knew my day would come!
I’m pro-plaid/tartan myself.
As a Campbell: Black Watch, accept no substitutes.
I had a girlfriend once give me a pair of silk boxers in Black Watch with Marvin the Martian on them.
Hey, I’ve heard it argued, defensibly and with citations, that we’re not even the most evolved primate. I’ll posit that the most evolved form of life is either a virus or some single celled organism (depending on your working definition of life), but whichever it is, it’d be the thing with the /shortest/ generational cycle, giving it the most opportunities for exposure to harm and adaptation.
What does “most highly-evolved” even mean? (Also, nice punchline)
It doesn’t. It’s the wrong question to ask, and the correct answer is to point out that it’s an incorrect way to look at evolution
It doesn’t what?
Joyce knows a trick question when she hears it. They should go with Joe, personally, as the specific individual organism as their answer. Joe can argue for real and Joyce can argue ironically, presenting his selection of underwear as a sure sign of the ultimate in evolved taste.
Mean anything.
It doesn’t real!
I’m torn between thinking that Prof. Brock wants to hear that because it is, of course, the correct answer, and shows his students are thinking on the right track…or that he wants them to say ‘man’ (or octopus, or a virus, or whatever) so he can crush their petty little souls.
The question is itself not an objective question with an objective answer. “Highly Evolved” is emotional terminology, it’s like asking ‘Best’ without qualifiers-the answer depends on the opinion of the asker.
this makes it not a scientific question, but instead a test of psychology and personality.
Most highly evolved is probably something like a mite. Short generations, and so closely associated with the host organism that it can’t change to a different species of host.
All man has is a inquisitive brain, tool use, and the capacity for language. That makes us EXCEPTIONALLY capable generalists, but also short-cuts us actually genetically adapting to a new environment, as we can more easily kill something furry to steal its coat.
Also, the opportunity for Man’s evolution is about to come to an end. We will, once we get past the moral hurdles, start using gene-tweaking to eliminate anything that is inimical to the individual’s survival, and eventually, start adding improvements in.
I want a stronger lower back and a throat that isn’t at risk of choking. Maybe a tweak that takes the appendix out for good, but leaves the tissue in place to continue to fulfill its secondary purpose. I suspect the women in this crowd would like a coccyx that softens in the last two weeks of pregnancy to make for a less labyrinthine birth canal. Possibly just soften up the entire pelvis.
Nah, it’s definitely a mountaintop bird.
Or maybe a goat.
Ooh or maybe the duck billed platypus. Evolution must jave been particularly high that day.
For starters, it’s a good sign that Joyce knows that something’s amiss.
My take is “highly evolved” is a term far more rooted in Science Fiction and it’s hold on the human imagination than legit biology. With my understanding of what it means to be evolved in practice, Sharks and Crocodilians are more “highly evolved” than humans due to needing so few species-changing mutations to adapt over a much longer period of time than even primates have existed, much less humans. They got it right millions of years ahead of us, and still going strong.
The correct answer is most likely what the Professor defines as the meaning of “highly evolved.”
But even that depends on luck that conditions in their environment remained stable enough or changed within benign/beneficial parameters to allow them to remain relatively unchanged over so long. One big event and you see species that have remained recognisably the same for long periods of years requiring rapid adaptation or disappearing entirely.
I agree with you that it’s an unrealistic question, and hopefully that’s the point the professor is trying to make. Evolution doesn’t have a start or end goal, which is what a lot of people get wrong, it’s a process of genetic material simply finding the best way to replicate itself. The most *well* evolved organism is one that is currently prospering in its niche without needing to adapt, but that’s a fluctuating thing rather than a static observation.
I would assume it meant the species which has undergone the most evolutionary changes over time, in which case I would suspect it’s something that evolves quickly like bacteria.
OTOH, you could argue that while bacteria change quickly, they’ve stayed basically like their distant ancestors and that the most highly evolved group would be the one that had changed the most.
It’s not rooted in Science Fiction, but in pre-scientific classifications. The “great chain of being” with humans as the pinnacle of creation and other creatures organized in steps below dates back to Plato and Aristotle.
According to Google, the answer is “chimps”
I thought it was Species 8472, or whatever The Traveler was.
Google is never wrong.
According to Google, Chimps are merely more “highly evolved” than humans, not the most highly evolved organism. In actuality, the answer is more likely that every organism are evolved to the same degree.
according to the New Scientist article reporting on the paper, the scientists compared chimpanzee & human genomes to that of their common ancestor (actually they used a macaque genome as a proxy), and found that the chimp genome was more different than the human one.
i couldn’t find the actual paper but i doubt it used the words “more evolved”, let alone “more highly evolved”.
I found it!
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/18/7489.short
“More genes underwent positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution”
nice!
and we can now confirm that the researchers did not use the words “more evolved” or “highly evolved” (or indeed, “evolved”) anyhere in their paper. Bad New Scientist, bad.
instead they talk about “positively selected genes”, which they abbreviate to PSG because that’s a mouthful.
their hypothesis for why there’s been more PSGs in chimps than in humans is interesting, they argue that, for most of the >6My since the two lineages split, chimps have had a significantly larger population (or technically, a larger effective population) than humans, which will usually correlate to rates of genetic innovation.
also it should be noted that PSGs is not the only way for differences to happen between two genomes. it doesn’t take into account deletions, insertions, number of copies, polymorphism, not to mention the epigenome…
…a realization i owe to this more recent article (2019 vs 2007), which reviews the many studies on chimp/human molecular divergence that have been done since. it doesn’t challenge the previous study’s findings but it does provide a sense that the issue is vastly more complicated than that first study might have led one to believe.
Notably, it concludes by saying: “the lack of information on genome populational diversity could impact the total extent of human and chimpanzee interspecies divergence by misinterpretation of polymorphic sequences.”
If I understand things correctly, every living thing currently extant is *equally* evolved in that the actions of evolution have been working on us all for exactly the same length of time. ‘More evolved’ is a nonsense term, so Joyce is correct that it’s a trick question.
Yes. But it’s still a 30 second answer.
It isn’t, maybe, a 30 second dissertation, and Joyce may have some complications with Creationism but a quick search for earliest forms of life, a couple of references to transition fossils and the phylogenetic “tree” will adequately show everything has been evolving since life started and is still evolving QED everything’s equally evolved as everything else. We justvhave different niche to fill.
Working through deconstructing that interpretation: Whatever definition is used, I doubt that anyone using the term means pure chronology from the local origin of life (else the much less obtuse question: when was the origin of life). ex:Two cars set out from Detroit travelling west for two hours. One is travelling at 30 mph, the other is travelling at 13.5 m/s. Which one has expended more stored energy vs. how long have they been travelling?
Unless conditions are remarkably similar, but perfectly slightly different to accomodate the subtle differences between the two cars, they are not equal, not even in how long they have been travelling, since the faster or heavier car will have experience slower time (whichever condition ends up having a bigger impact).
If one really wants to stick with that time definition then we must compute if time travels faster at the equator due to being further from the gravity well, or if it’s slower due to the surface of the earth moving faster due to rotation, as compared to the poles. (all must also account for local variations in surface density over time, and other influencing characteristics.)
Yep. See also “living fossils” nonsense.
That would have been my answer, the most evolved organism is one with the shortest generational cycle combined with the most plastic DNA, so likely some form of virus or bacteria, complicated by the possible argument about viruses possibly not being alive.
The correct answer is obviously crabs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
There’s an oddly specific xkcd about this
https://m.xkcd.com/2418/
Why cute that answer would net her a two hour lecture with a very irate Dina.
Joyce is suffering from a Joeverload, or possibly a Joeverdose.
Let’s hope she can find the antiJoete fast.
b u t t s
Joyce’s comic making career is in trouble if this causes her to contract Butts Disease, the condition by which you become able to only draw butts.
Though if she also draws female butts, I could see Daisy letting it slide.
While this may require the WBDDB to reappear for catharsis, I suspect her nemesis, Seymore Butts will dispatch her villainy with aplomb.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I mean in Bob’s Burgers, Linda’s sister contracted “Butts Disease” as you describe it, and spite her many misgivings she made a full recovery.
If she can draw dicks like she did previously and then butts…well, I believe we all know where that’s going then.
Hrmmm…is Walky’s position as the one with the best ass in danger?!
Walky has the best naturally occurring ass. Joe has to work for his.
The classic hard work vs talent debate. By that logic I think Joe has the edge. Walky’s ass will inevitably fade with time, while Joe’s discipline will keep his well maintained for years to come.
See I would have expected Joe to be the kinda guy that would skip leg day.
Can’t skip butt day, those are my thrusting muscles.
Your comments have each other’s Gravatar.
I’m . . . not sure Joyce is looking at Joe’s butt. She might be more concerned with his bulge instead.
Judging by her eyes, I’d say she’s very carefully not looking at his bulge.
BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
GOD SMILES ON US ALL THIS DAY
I came for the evolutionary debates, stayed for the Joe butt.
Damn, Joe. Joyce, can’t say I don’t get it.
So the answer is that there isn’t one, right.
Correct. “Highly-evolved” isn’t a thing, because it assumes evolution is directional (i think that’s the right word? “towards a purpose” at any rate), which is an annoyingly common misconception.
Thank you.
I mean I guess you could use ‘Highly Evolved’ as a synonym of ‘Derived’ but it would give you the wrong impression.
I treat it as “most iterated”. It seems to make anthro-centrists batty.
That’s pretty much the only way I could conceive of the term having any actual scientific meaning, but even then I have to wonder what, exactly, counts as an iteration.
I could see ‘highly evolved” as a a term for species that are so overfitted to the parameters of their current environment that tiny changes could potentially wipe them out in less than evolutionary timescales.
That sounds more like hyper specialized or adapted. Also, awesome grav. What is that bleak eye seeing and from whom/where does its gaze originate?
It’s relative to the scope of the discussion, as I understand it.
I don’t think most iterated makes any sense, because number of generations means nothing if no adaptation takes place in all that time. There are species with short generational cycles that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years, during which time whales have evolved from something resembling a shrew.
You raise a valid point about potentially discounting a certain class of data points, but I don’t think it’s a sufficient argument to completely sink iterations as a workable definition. And regardless of _appearing_ unchanged at a casual glance, all species change over time. Even if the environment hasn’t changed in a way encouraging macroscopic changes, species create internal pressures for evolutionary adaptation, as does disease and even just changes in food preferences. The lowly fruit fly, if restrained from iterating with its own kind, may die during mating when paired with a descendant removed by some generations. [sorry, it’s just a reference, not the original study].
supposing it was even possible to quantify “evolution” in that way, i don’t see what such a ranking would tell us. geneticists do think about reproductive period when doing “molecular dating”, but they’re only trying to end up with something like, “this species split from that species X million years ago”, not “this species is X units more evolved than that one”. because that’s not a metric that exists (that i know of).
but honestly, i don’t even see how we would begin to calculate that sort of number.
complex organisms such as humans have evolved immunity systems that randomly generate billions of antibody proteins, and hypermutation in parts of the genome to counter the higher rate of reproduction of microbes/viruses. so… who wins? do we still count one generation of human as equivalent to one generation of bacteria? because those don’t seem commensurate to me.
what about the bacteria in our gut, which go through a vast number of reproductive cycles throughout one animal’s life, how do we count these? their evolution surely affects our fitness as individuals, and as a species. so..?
it doesn’t seem worth the trouble
Aside from saying that it makes other primates better than us, and bacteria better than everything (except maybe viruses) to mentals the anthro-centrists? Absolutely nothing.
anthro-centrists think they’re so reasonable and balanced, but at the first sign of a crisis they’ll immediately turn around and throw in their lot with the anthro-fascists, and throw the rest of us under the bus, and throw up their hands in the agony and throes of scruples and throat-clutching.
The obvious answer is either dolphin or mice: one was smart enough to leave this planet and the other smart enough to create a planet for the sole purpose of figuring out what the Ultimate Question is.
So long and thanks for all the jokes.
Nah, the real answer is crabs.
That is exactly the point I went into the comments to see if anyone had made.
The fact that few people here realized that only proves Professor Brock’s assignment’s effectiveness as a surrogate for deep thought in regard to the concept of evolution.
Can I ‘like’ your statement?
Well, if you read „Most highly evolved“ as „has mutated most“ and still exists, there’s probably some answer (and it’s not ‚humans‘). Ah, here someone found a lizard with the most dna changes sind dinosaurs: https://www.livescience.com/2396-fastest-evolving-creature-living-dinosaur.html (I didn’t fact check this, so don’t throw it into a serious discussion without checking).
That’s interesting. But it’s the highest molecular evolutionary rate among… amniotes, it seems, probably not even among vertebrates; tuataras are not considered lizards, but the closest surviving relatives of lizards-including-snakes; Sphenodontia, not “Sphehodontia”; and – something the article contradicts itself on – they’re not dinosaurs, not remotely. Birds are dinosaurs. *eyeroll*
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the answer their professor is looking for, though I wonder how many students will realize that.
It could also just be his intention to get them thinking about how to justify their positions to begin with. Given there’s no actual correct answer and it seems to be pretty early in the course I doubt he’s expecting a deep understanding of the material.
In short its not what animal you pick, but how you make your case. Of course I’m sure the optimal answer is to point out that the question is flawed and properly explain how.
Now you’re starting to think like a scientist!
Science looks for good answers, and you can’t have good answers without good questions!
Yeah, the proper answer is that it’s a bad question. “highly” isn’t properly defined, so there’s no way to answer it.
Duh. The answer is birds or other equatorially mountain dwelling species. i.e. what lives atop Mount Chimborazo.
Alternatively: which species consumes the most mind altering chemicals as measured vs. baseline neurochemistry when exposed to a neutral diet.
Yes, that’s right. Thank you professor simmons.
Also, i’d like to mention that I gm a druid who routinely uses your eponymous stegosaurus tail to thagomize my npcs, so thank you for that!
I vote for jellyfish because they have no bones and are immortal.
I’d vote for tardigrades bc they can SURVIVE IN SPACE (and pretty much anywhere else from volcanos to antartica), you get to say “moss piglet” and “little water bear”, and most of all because they lasted through ALL FIVE mass extinctions.
Five? FIVE!? Conveniently not counting the big one are we?
I mean, if they want a D, maybe.
(The trick is the question is wrong, obviously.)
I think Joyce may want a D.
I see what you did there.
Interesting that Joyce apparently understands evolutionary theory enough to know that this is a trick question– which is more than I can say for, like, at least half of America. Dina, by way of Becky, is clearly rubbing off on her.
Alternatively she understands how teachers think well enough to recognize a trick question.
Becky would go completely
mentalsdotty, if she caught Dina rubbing off on Joyce.Still, maybe that would help resolve some of her own tension. (Not that it would do anything for mine).
What about Joyce rubbing off on Dotty?
Evolved for what? What kind of homework question is that ambiguous?!?!
I demand to speak to Professor Brock about his evidently questionable pedagogal methods!
It’s a great question if you want to dunk on your students’ anthropocentric view of the universe, which is a big part of 100 level classes.
Doubly so for any taught by Prof. Brock.
yeah that’s totally what this is
i just realised that sounded sarcastic, it’s 100% not, i’m confident that’s the point
While I know its not the intent, I choose to read this comment as sarcastic as well. Purely for comedic effect.
I think that would be a pass, because it’s an obvious trick question.
Now that I think about it, realizing WHY this question cannot have a singular, clear and cut answer may very well be a great learning experience, if not a way to distinguish deeper thinkers among the rest of the students (analogous to how classes on Newtonian mechanics are often made particularly difficult to weed out weaker physicists and engineers).
My apologies, Professor Brock.
It’s a question that makes you think. It’s a question that forces YOU to ask questions. There is no “correct answer”. He could be trying to see what you believe and how you come to that conclusion. You could say man, but how do you build on that? How did you come to it. What parameters did YOU give the question?
Evidently, a response that incorporates those kinds of realizations is exactly what Professor Brock wants to use as a surrogate to identify the deeper thinkers in his class.
Great work, Yotomoe!
But are we?
It’s a decent question, we have adapted, but a lot of our evolutionary adaptations come from the brain, and our tool making.
Is there really an animal that can survive a large number of biomes due specifically to their species’ biological traits?
We think our highest evolutionary traits are our brains but it’s more like a combination of things. Being Bipedal, Having thumbs and the ability to sweat are HUGE aspects to why we’re such a good animal. If you get rid of even one of those features we would Careen down the food chain.
Well, we would have before. Brain has kind of taken centre stage now that we’ve adapted enough tech to offset dependence on the others. As is currently being shown, the question left is if we can survive ourselves long enough to overcome disease and planet killer/stellar/galactic/universal events.
One day the humans lost the ability to sweat, that was when the lion attacked…and then all the lions were promptly killed because the inability to sweat has no effect on your ability to use firearms.
That stuff gets hot.
We’d get more over heating cases during the crossfire.
We’d basically have to invent cooling devices that humans keep with them all the time because with how our bodies metabolize we generate way too much heat to NOT sweat. Like people would constantly die of heat stroke.
We have invented personal wearable cooling devices.
I’m sure we have but they’d be a necessity rather than optional.
They came up with that for Sergeant Detritus’s brain ages ago. If we’re so evolved, why did it take us so long to catch up with the imagined version?
Sounds very Dune tbh
Honestly, barring an extinction event the likes of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs humans will probably find a way to persist. And being honest even then most extinction level events will be able to be forseen in such a way that some people (though not all) will still persist, breed and humanity will probably continue. Honestly a scenario that wipes us out for good is unlikely.
No, the thumb remains the most important. The only reason our feline overlords tolerate us is we can open those cans of cat food for them. No thumbs? It’s over.
Is still having the big toe sufficient?
Is there really an animal that can survive a large number of biomes due specifically to their species’ biological traits?
Yes.
Cockroaches will survive nuclear Armageddon just fine.
Moss piglets can survive in space. Check and mate cockroaches.
See also: bdelloid rotifers survive being frozen for 24,000 years…
Tardigrade, duh.
Ooh, that’s a good one. Maybe better than jellyfish.
That would be my choice
Tardigrades are bottom-tier trash and their skill choices make no sense for the environment they play in. A single snail of all things can kill thousands of tardigrades every minute. Their resistances to radiation, heat, and cold virtually never come into play. They don’t cooperate with each other in any way and are in fact cannibalistic. If by any chance they find themselves in space or another extreme situation, they can only survive there until the situation changes. They cannot gain xp or spawn new players at all under those circumstances.
Tardigrades are literally one of the worst builds in the game.
take that, tardigrades, “ooh look at me i’m a tardigrade i’m so sexy” NO well ok yeah kinda but i still hate you
Go there Joyce its inevitable (and Joe, when she does be the man we know you can be)
I mean, clearly it’s goats.
They’re really good at climbing and can eat steel cans (according to cartoons, which are very reliable sources), so I can see this.
That’s why they’re the Greatest of All Time.
All organism’s are equally evolved to best fit their niche until an organism is no longer the best fit for its particular niche, a human is no more highly evolved than an ant as we belong in different niches
Ants are way more evolved. They have had vastly more iterations to adapt to this environment and way of life and have been around since the Cretacious.
Arguably, though, we’re good at changing the niches to suit us. Of course, we’ve done that so much that the niches are going to take their revenge and destroy us.
The concept of “highly evolved” is not meaningful.
That’s because it’s a trick question.
In the same way that like…most things are highly evolved. Like I’m more impressed with animals that evolve specifically to counter their environment.
Not without a useful definition, but then no word or phrase is. So either the students fall into the trap of operating under false pretenses (naiveté), or they derail themselves with a search for a workable definition without knowing if it is what Dr. Brock meant.
I’m a briefs-wearer, I like the feel more, but am often envious of the wide myriad of patterns and colors available to boxers-wearers. This is one such case.
I’m a boxerjock guy, best of both worlds plus stops chafing between the thighs and butt
Boxers are the best. They feel so free. I hate my underwear conforming to my skin.
Understandable, but I like some support. Contents shifting during transit, so to speak, is very much distracting to me and not comfortable.
I wear briefs during the day, and boxers at night. In lieu of sleeping al fresco which I did for a long time.
For me it’s task dependant. Soldiering, outdoorsing, climbing etc… boxer-briefs. Sleep nude. Casual hang about, has to be boxers. Honestly if it wasn’t for environmental, industrial and even daily standard hazards, and inter-personal hygeine in shared spaces, we’d all be better off nude. Largo has that much right. However, we’re wrapped up in so much social, cultural and relgious toxicity that we’d go insane before we could transition at this point anyways.
*amendement: Boxers with lycra/spandex. I can’t stand static (non-stretch) under clothes. That shit’s for the victorians.
while we’re talking biology, i’ve heard it said by some “distance-running is our superpower” paleontologist that no known human society exists that doesn’t have some sort of underwear.
and the reason, he claimed, is that underwear was first invented to tether the jiggly parts while running.
i mean, like, maybe? i’m not sure if by underwear he also meant, like bras or if he was only concerned with penises? maybe he just assumed that running down prey was mostly done by penis-havers for most of human history? he didn’t linger very long on that point, so my guess is that was just a silly pet theory of his.
Seems likely that was only a pet theory, given that the relationship between sex and hunting roles varied tremendously throughout human history.
in fairness, he didn’t speak of either loincloths or whatever might be the generic word for a chest binding thing. i’m not even sure he used the word underwear, but i guess he must’ve because i recall thinking that it remained vague as to whether that included boob-containment technology or only dick-strapping implements.
here’s the podcast episode in case you’re interested =)
so, because i’m exceptionally idle today i’ve gone and located and transcribed the relevant bit of the episode. So the speaker is called Daniel Liberman, “Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology”, and here is my transcription. this is a live conference, so sometimes he’s obviously showing slides, and also i have no sources to provide, DWI
[30:50]
finally, i think that running can help us understand some human universals. there’s been a lot of efforts over the years to try to find out what’s common to all societies, right?
so for example, all societies cook their food, we all have marriage, we all have mother-in law jokes, we all have music— but it turns out that one human universal is that every culture in the world has underwear. we all have some sort of modesty accoutrement.
there’s lots of different kinds, some of them are more intersting than others.
but i would argue that, maybe, this also has something to do with running, because when you run, you’re creating substantial accelerations of your body, right? running is actually jumping from one leg to another, that’s basically what you’re doing when you’re running, biomechanically.
and of course, when you jump, you’re accelerating your centre of mass up; and then as you fall, your centre of mass is accelerating down, you’re going up and down, and up and down, and up and down.
and all of you remember high school physics, right? remember Newton’s second law, for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. So, when this guy’s body’s acccelerating downward, everything that’s not tied down is gonna accelerate up; and when he’s accelerating up, everything that’s not tied down, like his penis, is gonna accelerate… down. it happens with breasts too, right, anything that’s not tied down.
so i would argue that when we started running, millions of years ago, and we had to run really long distances, all that jiggling and flapping was perhaps a little bit uncomfortable, and so we figured out how to tie things down.
This is the oldest known underwear in the archeological record, it’s from an egyptian tomb.
so the benefit of underwear is that it prevents some of that annoying jiggling.
(…) but of course everything has tradeoffs, there’s costs and benefits to everything, and the benefits may be less jiggling, the cost of course is chafing.
(…) in short, i would like to argue that nothing in biology including jiggling penises and whatever, including the marathon, makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Already familiar with the superpower theory (sweat and the ability to find/transport water is amazing), I am going to attack the underwear theory. The problem being that by definition, to have underwear, one must first have over-wear. Since there are many tribes that wear nothing more than a thong or loin cloth, they _obviously_ aren’t wearing underwear, as there is nothing to be worn under the loincloth. Unless he was proposing that primitive tribes all had access to victoria’s secret?
careful with loaded words, such as “primitive”.
other than that, Solid Take. argument destroyed
Ooff. Comment noted. I did intentionally avoid such earlier in my take and then intentionally used primitive later to actually mean ‘early’, but left far too little to differentiate the intention. mea culpa.
Didn’t Joyce grow up in a house full of brothers? Surely she’s seen dudes in their underwear before. Saw pictures of men in catalogs? No one is that pure. Or is it Joe in underwear she’s having the issues with? That makes sense, then.
Seeing your brother in his underwear and seeing a hot guy in his underwear are two very different things.
This is only possible if hot guys are not allowed sisters.
Hotness is at least in part in the eye of the beholder, and due to the Westermarck effect, siblings almost never fall into that category.
The guy might be a hot guy to the public at large but to his sister he’s just her brother and not hot at all.
The Westermarck effect is not well substantiated. Shooting from the hip, an equally valid theory is that the reason why sublings don’t often find each other attractive is that in growing up together they have an established history of irritating the shit out of each other, as they were each other’s practice board for learning societal social norms. (i.e. they know what not to do to irritate others because they already did it to their siblings, and learned the hard way, what not to do.) This would also substantiate why marriages are progressively failing at higher rates in societies with lower birth rates as children are growing up with fewer siblings and less exposure to how to treat each other appropriately. As a result, people enter into marriage and then go about pissing each other off as they can’t be bothered to make each other feel sufficiently loved to sustain the marriage.
hahaha that sounds like the abstract for a BAHfest conference =D
Thank you! That is some of the highest praise for the dribble that creeps forth from my gaping maw.
Those dudes in their underwear were related to her though. I’ve seen my mom in a bra but obviously I’m not gonna react the same way as I would if a completely unrelated woman of the same age had her tits out in front of me.
Well, the religious group she grew up in is evidently more the exception than the rule in MANY aspects, including this one.
Same reason why Newly Bi Danny doesn’t care about his not frequently minimally dressed roommate. When you’ve grown up with them… eh.
Indeed, Danny doesn’t see Joe in a sexual way, and presumably, even if Joyce’s siblings were casual about clothing, she wouldn’t necessarily take much notice. This is especially true since most of the men we’ve seen her to be attracted to (Ethan, Joe, and Jacob) are built quite differently than dudes in Joyce’s family, judging by John and Hank, even before you get into family relations. Even outside of squick, they’re probably not her type.
It is entirely possible that her family was the sort that didn’t allow even small children to be out of their bedroom or bathroom without being fully clothed.
Can’t find the specific strip, but I wanna say Joyce mentioned early on that she had her own bathroom growing up because was (so far as Hank and Carol knew) the only girl in the family, so I’m guessing Hank and Carol had strict rules about who was allowed to be in what states of undress where.
That or it just means their house had enough bathrooms for that to be possible. My parents would’ve had to have moved us if they wanted to do that.
Assuming she did see any of her brothers in their underwear, most people generally don’t find that sexy compared to someone they’re not related to in their underwear.
https://imgur.com/a/SyJYmFA
Oops my pen slipped.
Cute!
Fantasies like that are why I’m cracking. Not that I have any hope of forming a healthy relationship at this point, and one night stands and sex work leave me emotionally more bereft than doing nothing. People always say they’re not all like that, but seem to forget that it’s _me_ doing the looking, and I have the track record of the demon sphere in my past associations.
Has anyone else worked out the solution to the fallacies and unsupported jumps in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus?
Jeeze, when my pen slips it just makes for messy paperwork. I think I prefer your version.
Same
Hot!
Heck yeah your pen slipped
This is awesome, is what I mean. I’m tired and Joyce is hornt
Your pen is slipped indeed. Though I have to admit that she strikes me as looking more like Shortpacked Amber than Joyce. Maybe it’s that the shirtpocket looks like a Shortpacked nametag.
Haha true, but I definitely draw Amber WAY thiccer than Joyce. Though my Joyces have been thickening. She’s kinda curvy.
Oh, certainly.
Great stuff!
Even Yoto’s version of Amber has got nothing on Alex thiccnesswise.
You have made my Joeyce shipping heart very happy.
“did you spill something” XD
Isn’t it weird how accidental and/or random patterns can be interpreted by the conscious mind as reflecting their basest desires or repressed fantasies?
But yeah, that’s TOTALLY gonna happen.
Okay that’s. Hot.
I’ve been secretly hoping you’d draw some JoJo ship art!
Stephen Bierce, you have a song for this or do I have to choose one?
Too late.
*plays “Adirectional” on Voxola PR-76*
Nice.
I follow that up with The Vines’ Highly Evolved.
Oh god help me, I’ve been both of them.
I meant that assignment wise, for the record.
As for the question….sounds like a trick question. How are we defining ‘most evolved’? By most generations? Quality of mutations (and what do we mean by quality?) Most specimens? Most advanced specimens (and how do you define that?)
I’d think it would be the one that best adapts to its specific environment but that depends on what environment you mean and what creatures are in it.
See that makes more sense. I was wondering in what context you were in your underwear in front of a semi antagonistic acquaintance, completely oblivious to their attraction towards you
ngh
oh god something about him going to take a shower
suddenly i can smell the jefferson hall men’s wing funk from here, across space and time
i was only there a few times but holy hell it made an impression and that impression was bad
worst kind of flashback
Same. The boys floors on my hall weren’t necessarily stinky, but they had that heavy, hard to breathe air that makes your brain say “yeah no this place stinks.”
Also if they say humans they are gonna fail. Humanity is itself a vain conceit. We are all machines. By that logic the most advanced organism can’t be man. Way not to pay attention to the class lecture.
The most advanced doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s advanced. It’s like being the hottest ice cube, the wettest desert, The best Micheal Bay Transformers.
You could argue the Ocean is the wettest desert, a sparse expanse with minimal drinkable water. Not by the traditional definition but you could make the case.
The main problem with that is by definition deserts get very little precipitation and while I’m no expert on oceanic climates, I would imagine they get a fair amount of rain. Perhaps certain parts of the ocean could be defined as a desert, but definitely not as a whole.
Yeah, you’ve gotta use an informal definition for it to work. It’s not a great argument but you can make it.
But at that point, you’re just changing what things mean to fit your needs, by that definition I could argue that my pillow is a desert, so long as I choose to define a desert as a soft thing which a person rests his head on. Of course, my example is much more extreme than yours, but the point stands that if you want to argue that the ocean is a desert, you must first argue to change the definition of the word “desert”, which can be done of course.
Yeah. I think ‘a desert is a sparse expanse with little to no drinking water’ would fall under bending the definition rather than breaking it, but yeah.
I gotta back Thag on this one. As Morpheus said, some rules can be bent, others can be broken. Given that antarctica is also a desert, I don’t think it’s an indefensible stretch to classify some sections of ocean as desert. All oceans? definitely not. But some sections of ocean definitely get ridiculously small amounts of rain.
Some redditors discussed this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5v1f3j/are_there_ocean_deserts_are_there_parts_of_the/
Then there’s also desert oceans, or hypoxic ocean where the water doesn’t carry enough oxygen to support aerobic life. Fortunately this rarely happens in our atmosphere except for some well documented cases of whole villages being suffocated or industrial accidents.
https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.795
Lastly, the south pacific gyre. Because it’s cool.
https://www.sciencealert.com/in-the-heart-of-the-ocean-lies-a-desert-and-scientists-just-found-what-lives-in-it
In school I learned that “desert” technically just means it has very little precipitation per year, and that Antarctica is technically a desert. It doesn’t get much snow at all, it just doesn’t melt either (aside from climate change). According to that class, being hot and dry is just part of the colloquial definition.
So I’d pick Antarctica as the wettest (and also coldest) desert. Woo!
The answer to the class question is that evolution is not a direction along which you can advance. That’ll be fun for fundie-educated Joyce, where humans are made in God’s image, and in charge of the earth, and so on.
Props for nailing the south pole desert, but since the temperature there precludes water from ‘wet’ting, I suspect it would fail the wetness definition for most mentals.
Perhaps the Southern Ocean specifically would be the wettest desert. Only a few days old and it could already have a claim to fame.
Or you could use the old definition: a place where no one lives.
In the clearing stands a Boxer and a fighter by his trade…
That’s one hell of a wedgie, Joe
According to this meme I saw it’s a crab, and who are you going to believe, literally any other source, or a meme?
Oof. The proper name escapes me, but crabification is just one common convergence point in evolution. It’s not the only possible convergence point.
Carcinazation, and yeah, obviously, it’s a design that keeps occurring, probably since it’s very efficient for certain lifestyles.
<3 Thank you.
It’s a body design that has evolved a few times (but not even that many, like 5 times), mostly in anomura and exclusively in crustaceans, so though it’s a cool word (the coiner whereof made it super-memeable by defining it as “one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab”) it’s really just one of many instances of evolution converging
The correct answer is crab. On a long enough time scale, everything will eventually become crab.
Man is the lazy answer. The proper answer is sharks, the animal so perfectly evolved they’ve barely changed over the past million years.
Personally, I would go with sea sponges, sea sponges have survived some shit.
If a sea sponge can be cut infinitely and does not die of old age, is it immortal?
Hmmm.
Unless it’s immune to the heat death of the universe, I’m going to say no.
It’s okay Joyce. You may look. Respectfully.
But that would require respecting Joe, which is clearly a bridge too far.
The answer is the tardigrade.
Joyce gets a look at the booty and decides maybe the question wasn’t *quite* so hard, anyway…
I’m going to say Ruppel’s Vulture.
I mean, it’s definitely cockroaches.
I think you could also make a good argument for crabs (bc carcinisation), also bacteria.
But yeah, def. cockroaches.
my presentation would be about ten seconds to state that the organism in question cannabis, and the rest would be me standing there silently while The Next Episode plays on the boombox behind me.
Man?
Um, hello, climate change? Reality TV? Religious fundamentalism? Fox News? Michael Bay movies?
I mean making bad decisions has nothing to do with Evolution. In fact, the most highly evolved organism doesn’t even have to be smart. It just needs to survive and thrive in its environment. We could light the world on fire, but if we found a way to continue living on it, our evolution was successful.
Seconded. I’m proven fit since I’ve got kids, but their other parents were the worst decisions of my life. Make no mistake, my kids were not mistakes. I’ve been involved in zero pregnancy scares. But their other parents? Well, there’s reasons why I don’t date and had best remain single.
How’s that line go?… “fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice, and what kind of a fuckin’ moron does that *TWICE* AND does it WORSE the second time?”
Correct. Except that intelligence is actually a huge game-changer in evolution, for it allows us to gain new skills and abilities without having to wait thousands or even millions of years to evolve the hard way.
yeah, but there are other ways to adapt quickly, for instance by reproducing very fast and mutating a lot. i don’t see why intelligence would be an inherently better evolution than other strategies.
also, saying that human brains are a good evolutionary strategy feels like an ad-hoc hypothesis. It so happens that we belong to a species whose population has skyrocketed over the last few thousand years thanks to technology humans were able to develop via brains.
but that demographic explosion was not a given until we got good at domesticating crops around 10,000 BCE. Until then, estimates i’ve read place worldwide human population at 10K to 30K, based on genetic analysis. i don’t think that’s particularly impressive, and i’m wary of any big claims about big brains that can only claim 10,000 years of evolutionary success. that’s nothing. Maybe some amphibian evolved some skin pigment or venom or digestive enzyme at some point that made its population go boom for a few thousand years? how is that less of a “game-changer” than having a big brain, unless we’re being a bit anthropocentric? (and there’s nothing wrong with being anthropocentric as long as we admit it.)
I think we should probably hold off for another couple million years before we call human brains an evolutionary success story.
(we do most likely hold the forever record for species having the greatest impact on their environment in the shortest amount of time, but that’s not quite the same question.)
I didn’t say human brains necessarily, I just said intelligence.
The ability to prepare for dangers before they are encountered may not be sufficient for being the “most evolved” (as bad as a germ that is), but it sure does help for survival.
That, and the consequences of natural cycles we are normally subject to can be averted by being aware of them, so there’s that.
Bad Boys was a fun movie and The Rock is good, tight action movie with a really good cast, its even better if you think of it as an unofficial Bond movie
So its not like he can’t do decent movies, just goes for the money. Bit like Adam Sandler I guess
That’s why it’s a trick question – there’s what most humans consider ‘highly evolved’ and then there’s what biodiversity considers successful.
Damn Joe’s got a nice fat ass.
Plump. Bubbly. Spherical. Toight. Toned. Buff. Stacked. Packed/Packin’. I mean, the list goes on, butt I gotta disagree on it being fat. I mean, unless he _never_ squats or walks, which is demonstrably false.
Noice job on the artwork again Yoto. You’re a scholar and a gentleperson.
It all depends. A lot of people who build a lot of muscle will, in fact, still build a healthy layer of fat over their musculature. One can absolutely have a fat ass while being very muscular and somewhat cut. I’d argue it’s actually the more optimal way of forming muscle, rather than what’s considered show muscles, which is what body builders and movie stars often build.
Oh yeah for sure. Fat’s got a lot of uses beyond energy storage and insulation. But I expect Joe is aiming more for show muscles than raw strength, though it be a nice benefit.
i’m sure he’s aiming for his ass to be yummy, so i vote layer of fat.
Dude doesn’t skip squats.
Joes smart. Theres plenty of research, anecdotal and data that shows that working your legs and upper body produces more gains than working your upper body alone
Right, and given he works out with Jacob, they likely kind of spur each other into working both harder and smarter.
Ya Bois caked up and i was not expecting it
Cats.
They domesticated humans.
if I’m given something like this question when I go back to school (which holy shit I’m going to be a university senior in a couple months) I would absolutely spend the entire class talking about how highly evolved really doesn’t make sense because it falls more into guided evolution/acting like there’s a big goal to evolution, as opposed to evolution “just” being a really complicated iterative process that responds to environmental and genetic factors as they appear. everything is evolved; nothing is highly evolved, because the concept doesn’t mean anything.
There is a goal to evolution. Survival of the genes.
Not necessarily. I mean, any species that manages to get its genetic code frozen and thrown into orbit around a black hole until it devolves from Hawking Radiation is technically the “most evolved” species if the only qualifier is making its genes survive as long as possible.
However, the Gene View of Evolution, formulated by Richard Dawkins, is rather useful because it can help us understand evolutionary situations in ways that are otherwise not obvious through other frameworks.
That’s not a goal, that’s an outcome.
if evolution wanted genes to survive, whatever that means, then evolution did a bad job cos genes keep mutating.
the one exception is Levis 501 genes. those are very durable.
Is anyone kind of hoping Dina blows this?
I kind of would love to see her feuding with a teacher. Feuding with a teacher is a college rite of passage.
I think intellectually contending with and criticizing the nature of the question is actually what Professor Brock was after.
That, and Dina’s extensive expertise in evolution, and biology in general for that matter, renders her failure of the assignment highly unlikely.
Having been in academia, knowing a subject extensively is NOT a way to achieve success in it.
Quite the opposite. The greatest lesson you learn in University is to do what the professor wants.
How I got my masters:
Me: I have a essay on the sexism and patriarchy in Beowulf.
Female Professor of Norse Literature: Rewrite it about how Beowulf is progressive and values women.
Me: Yes ma’am.
And that is the problem with some specific academics, and may be more prevalent in the arts due to their inherent subjectivity. It is however not an implicit problem with acadamia per-se. Once you enter peer-review, you become free(r) of individual bias and more subject to rigour concerning procedure than result.
You have my sympathy in being paired with a shit supervisor. Although arguably, what she may have been trying to teach you was how to argue a point effectively, which is harder to do when you don’t personally support that position. Since it seems you got your master’s while doing so, it appears that you learned said lesson, possibly while not realizing you had done so.
*I should have said “incompatible supervisor”
I very much learned the lesson of, “I wanted my masters.”
“Ah nice philosophy. See good in bad. I like.”
ok so I agree with the people who say that no organism actually qualifies because each develops to fill their own niche, but my brain still went with “peacock mantis shrimp”.
Yet another one gets it! Congratulations.
So long as not too many people here continue to reach these not so obvious kinds of insights, Professor Brock’s assignment will prove effective identifying the deepest thinkers in his class and precisely determining the extent of their aptitude in biology.
To get a better picture of where I am coming from, this related to the reason why many higher level aptitude tests are designed so that only the most skilled takers will be able to actually finish them within the alloted time.
Please excuse the multipost.
By the way the answer is Crocodilllians. Crocodiles and Aligators haven’t evolved in millions of years…because they don’t have to. They’ve basically been perfect since time and memorial.
If they haven’t evolved in millions of years then they may be highly successful, but the one thing they are not is highly evolved.
I mean it depends. If we ARE viewing evolution as an endgame, isn’t reaching a point where you simply no longer need to evolve mean you’ve basically completed your evolution? Reached the highest peak of your evolution early? Again the question is open ended so I can insert my own definition on what “highly evolved” means.
If you successfully *ahem* “insert your own definition”, then I’m pretty sure it means you were sufficiently “highly evolved”.
You kind of have to insert your own definition, because there isn’t a good definition for what “highly evolved” means.
Which is why it’s a trick question.
Because it’s been *ages* since I got to liquify a deceased equus via repetive compression:
If one were to *cough* /nudge/ insert their definition (aka data, aka DNA) *wink, nudge*, then they were sufficiently (know what I mean? know what I mean?) fit {hand wobble, nudge, wink}, i.e. highly enough evolved. (say no more, say no more.)
…
What’s it like?
Sharks haven’t changed a heckuvalot over the eons either.
The moral of the story is, Reject land, Embrace water, and if you can develop sharp teeth.
Yes, they have. That’s why there isn’t just one species of them.
That’s not necessarily true.The idea of not evolving in lots of years and still having multiple species just means those species evolved long ago. But I honestly havent’ researched my bold claim much.
From my (quick wikipedia) research, the earliest described fossils of the genus Alligator is about 37 million years old. Crocodylus, Mecistops, Caiman and Gavialis seem to be much younger, 12 million, 7.5 million, 14 million and 5 million respectively. I don’t know about Paleosuchus, wikipedia says it diverged 30 million years ago but not whether or not that was the extant genus or an ancestor. Osteolaemus seems to be late miocene/early pliocene, so around 5 million for them too
Tomistoma is like 50 million years old, which makes it the oldest extant crocodilian genus as far as my limited research tells me.
All of those genuses have continued to evolve and develop for the record. Change and mutations are inevitable, but it is impressive how reliable the base crocodilian form is
Genera, not Genuses. D’oh!
on the other hand, crocodilian diversity is looking pretty sorry now compared to what it was in its heyday.
as a Common Descent Podcast listener, i feel obligated to counter any claim for crocodilian superiority with snakes.
In this case, it’s noteworthy that snakes also have been doing their body type for a while (though not for nearly as long), except they’re crazy diverse.
Everyone here is wrong, both the people that say the answer is nothing because that’s not how evolution and natural selection work, and the people who are saying stuff like crabs, sharks, or sea sponges.
The true answer, beyond a doubt, is Faz.
I actually have a graph that shows that you are, in fact, correct.
Quite a sweeping response, and you are inadvertently included in your usage of “everyone “.
Galasso is above such labels.
Fool.
Special Pleading. Of course.
The graph points UP
Mind control fungus. Boom. Plus, you can bring in some fried mushrooms as a prop.
Dang he’s handsome ♥
this is an amazing strip we have today, thank you willis
oh no
Joyce has contracted a new variant of butts disease
The most evolved form is clearly DAT ASS.
Indeed
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3476
I love, _love_ that the cited comic has a votey saying it’s not actually true, but it’s being cited to support exactly that position.
What disappoints me is that they didn’t play on the potential joke that the creepy ass-fetish was also a creepy-ass fetish.
It might not be true
But it’s funny
Which I truly feel is all that’s needed to support the position ‘The most evolved form is clearly DAT ASS.’
and after all isn’t funniness
the most highly-evolved form of truth
*mic drop*
(Dat) piece (is) out (of this world).
Oh and for sure it is hillarious. I love xkcd. It just added a layer for me with the votey.
and by xkcd i’m guessing you mean smbc ^^
It’s an embedded joke for smbc fans and/or the Weinersmiths (should I be so lucky that they read my words). Mr. Weinersmith often jokes about people thinking he’s the XKCD guy because *that guy* is smart and cool and they both have four letter comics that often feature intellectual (or pseudo-intelllectual) jokes. It often reads to me like, even though he readily stands on his own, Weinersmith might claim to have to try harder and stretch to see farther, because he’s in the company of such giants. In reality they’re both awesome people doing awesome things while *also* putting smiles on a lot of faces.
ooooh sorry for ruining joke & thanks for explaining same, i’m evidently not well enough versed in SMBC lore!
MAN (, dat ass be fine!).
I ship it! Also what could they do for two hours?
Well, we know from a witness that Joe’s best quality is his stamina, so it won’t be a problem on his end. Joyce might get overwhelmed, but it’s possible it would be in such a good way that she’d decide to skip class and carry on for longer. So I think your question answers itself, but might not be good for their grades.
I see a lot people answering the highly-evolved question with animals. No love for the other kingdoms of organisms, like plants? I once heard in passing (and never fact-checked) that strawberries have much longer DNA sequences than humans. Is that worth something? (Also, I like trees.)
Doesn’t necessarily mean “more evolved” though.
Humans are endothemrs/”warm-blooded”, we maintain a constant metabolic temperature. Takes a lot of energy and behavioral work, but it means our cellular machinery just needs to be tuned for that temperature. Cold-booded animals and plants need to be able to work across a wide range of temperatures without that kind of cheating, so they need more genes to make more enzymes that can work in different conditions. Kind of like an electric hybrid car where the gas engine has one speed, ‘generator’, vs. a gas car with a complicated transmission.
AIUI, not a pro biologist.
I actually considered saying Kudzu vines because if human died, Kudzu vines would absolutely take over the Americas and probably every other country they’re in. Regardless of how many animals eat them I feel like they’d outgrow that and keep growing.
That just makes Kudzu the most >i>stubborn, not necessarily the “most evolved”.
I personally have no specific answer because, not only do I not know where to even start evaluating that, the whole concept of there being a hierarchy where some living things evolved “higher” than others I find… really icky.
“There is no specific answer” would be the correct answer
That’s worth nothing, because large genomes consist mostly of junk. Over half of our own genomes consists of retrovirus corpses in all stages of decay, most of the rest of copy errors, and most of the rest after that of broken genes.
mmm that’s a bit of an outdated understanding, i believe?
non-coding DNA is now understood to have a regulatory effect on the probability of genes getting transcribed, which might seem wasteful if DNA is seen as analogous to a computer algorithm deterministically generating an organism, as early geneticists thought, but makes more sense if we accept that probabilistic (“stochastic”) processes occur all the time everywhere in nature, from the macro level of evolution to the micro level of cell biochemistry. then we can start to see how stochastic expression elegantly explains why genomes seem so chaotic.
i’m not a biologist though, much less a geneticist. i just like the story this seems to tell about the hubris of reductionism and simplistic metaphors ^^
“Ow, I banged my hubris.” Is going to be my new go-to phrase when I fuck up.
This goes in the drawer with ‘we only use 10% of our brains’. It’s a confession of ignorance.
That’s actually a myth. The essential context was missing when it the media reported the discovery that we only use 10% of our brains at a time on average.
You actually DON’T want to use 100% of your brain at a time. This is what is referred to as a seizure.
oh Wagstaff!! that was Jhon’s point ^^
anyway, what’s your source for your claim that we use 10% of our brain at a time on average?
refutations of the myth i’ve read (e.g. wikipedia) say that the number has no basis in reality, and that “all brain areas are always active”.
If anything bacteria/archaea are the most evolved, because they’ve had the most generations to evolve.
Or the virus infecting them.
(Man, archaeal viruses are wild https://research.pasteur.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/research_pasteur-group-mart-krupovic-figures-1.jpg)
I feel like we should form a club. Not like a social group per-se. More like transformers or power rangers or Voltron, but as a large fulcrumatic levered mass of destruction. I feel like we could accomplish a lot together.
Form blazing crab!
C’mon, Joyce, look at those buns encased in soft cotton fabric. Give yourself over to absolute pleasure. Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh~
Sorry, channeled Dr. Frank-n-furter for a moment there
Dorothy.
Anyone else thought to simpsons episode Little Big Mom and then thought”Stupid sexy Joe” or Am I the only one?
“Gummy Venus-de-Milo, auaughhghgglglglg”
Ok. I got a question for y’all. What’s the most highly evolved Butt.
https://www.strawpoll.me/45405013 (multi-voting enabled)
I also would appreciate if you explain how you came to your answer in a reply.
All of those are human and fall within intraspecific variation. If you disregard bias towards our own species the correct answer is probably a Mandrill’s. They’ve got the most developed ornamentation that I am aware of.
That said I can’t say this is a topic I have much experience with, an evolutionary specialist with greater knowledge of posterior development may have a different take
You wouldn’t give it to the Macaque? Their butts swell up when they’re ready to mate.
As mentioned, I have a limited understanding of this topic
It is a trick question. The answer is Earth. The planet is a living organism and within it billions of other organisms help it regulate and prosper.
You may be on to something. Setting aside the pseudoscientific notion of the environment having a “mind” or “feelings” and other nonsense, there is much merit to thinking of the environment as a living thing in terms of what defines a living thing; namely, their ability to grow, develop, acquire energy, remove waste and reproduce.
Jury is still out on that last one.
Their ability to reproduce is due to their pioneer species going elsewhere to start new environments. Although I agree it does differ from reproduction of cells in that the newly formed environment will not have it’s development guided by any form of transmitted information present in those species.
Given genetic engineering, I’m not certain of that.
the earth did reproduced once. this huge asteroid had a
crushcrash on her and from their, um, “union” the moon was born.so romantic <3
But the moon was stillborn. If we’re working on a gaia “living earth” hypothesis, we aren’t certain we’ve propagated life to another body yet. Quite the opposite so far (to our limited understanding). I’m pretty sure the gaia hypothesis is taking about the living earth as chiefly being the biosphere, rather than (as Yoda put it) “this crude matter” at her core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medea_hypothesis
Organisms adapt to their environment, and that includes the other organisms; but the outcome is not always best for everyone – or anyone.
Ah, The Tragedy of the Commons. Beings that act in their own self interest can easily wind up making themselves and everyone worse off, regardless of their intentions.
Ah, the Tragedy of the Commons. Invented from no evidence and used to justify privatizing common land that had, contrary to the supposed tragedy, been managed for mutual benefit for centuries or even longer. But those who could buy up the no longer public land could become even richer.
It’s not that there aren’t cases where the basic idea does apply of course, but the original one that it was based on was complete nonsense. Quite possibly deliberately so.
Whaatt? Rich people are assholes who would fuck over others for a buck? Say it ain’t so!
And of course the commons wasn’t *un-owned*, but was owned in a sense that was not recognized under the extant legal structure of the time. It was (as you point out) being shared and cared for by the local community, but that didn’t impart legal ownership. (Sorry, this is all just a bad attempt at shouting *preach*).
The Tragedy of the Commons is from the title of an essay written in 1968 by Hardin. That essay was an argument for the need of managing common property, and was misconstrued by people who used it as an argument for privatising. In any case, 1968 is a long time after the Enclosures movement.
Hardin chise his hypothetical example because of its prior use by Lloyd on a published lecture from 1837, which is also after the Enclosures movement. Lloyd seems to have used it as a hypothetical example to clarify his discussion of a point about unmanaged exploitation of a common resource, an early insight into the economics of goods that are rival but not excludible. He might have had a secret agenda of supporting continued enclosures, but the proponents of e.g. the highland clearances didn’t bother to cite Lloyd they way that 1970s and 1980 privatises alluded to Hardin. In any case, throwing shade on the phrase and the analysis behind it by attributing dishonest motives and incorrect dates to either Hardin or Lloyd is sketchy.
Real commons were, of course, not or seldom unmanaged. Traditional owners were aware of the danger of over-grazing and other misuses like it, and had customs to control it. Just as Hardin was advocating.
For background, enclosures of common land in England go back at least to 1604, and the great Enclosures Act was 1773, well before Lloyd. Enclosures did continue at least until 1914, though.
Hardin, who coined they actual phrase “The Tragedy of the Commons” and was the writer whose paper the privatisers alluded to in their arguments, actually argued against the misuse of his work, and said that he wished he had titled his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”.
In the essay, the unmanaged commons is a hypothetical construction used to clarify and abstract point. The lack of evidence that such commons actually existed is not important. It’s like a word problem in trigonometry — it doesn’t actually matter whether there actually is a person who wants to determine the height of a tree: that’s just a hypothetical example to clarify a point about similar triangles.
Bounce a quarter off that ass, daaaaaammmmmmn.
I’ve really been in an ass mood today and god damnit, super firm asses you can bounce stuff off of is really hot. (I’m also in the mood for seeing a booty get a hearty smack).
Gah. I need to stop. Anyways, TiktokTube has you covered Yoto.
But who should smack Joe’s?
Honestly, I’m just gonna go crack and say Jacob.
I was gonna say Joyce obviously. Like really hard. Like really fucking hard. She might need a running start.
It’s λ phage.
“Honey, please get some medicine! It’s just a phage.”
“UGH. IT’S NOT A PHAGE, MOM”
I read that in my head as “it’s [VALVe logo noise] phage”.
Lots of people read Terry Pratchett, so I’m sure a non-insignificant number of people would answer “cockroach”. But in all probability it’s just the flu (cue NOFX)
I would day whatever that immortal squid is called, absolutely sci-fi shit
If we’re going sf, then the answer is the babelfish.
Oh no i mean the read one, like the one that can live up to 5000 or so years and revert back into its “baby state” whenever it is injured in order to heal itself.
Which is some sci-fi shit but made real (possibly through the wish of some marine biologist)
Dang, man!
You can do a lot with two hours and forty minutes *waggles eyebrows*
She doesn’t look flustered in the last panel so I presume that she’s judging the boxers
Joe seem to not notice his effect on Joyce. Dunno why, but this seems sweet to me♡. And very funny.
Yeah, guessing it’s possible he either is just waking up/too annoyed with her to really think about it, or if he is still so convinced she’s too good for him.
Remember, Joyce: If this ‘highly evolved’ thing means anything, surely your biological needs come secondary to the control of your higher intelligence?
I challenge you to deliver a presentation saying Dolphins are more evolved and expand on that bit from The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy as the basis of your assertion. I suspect that if you present something sufficiently plausible-sounding, you’ll get credit for effort!
A: Either the African Grey parrot or the dolphin.
Q: What are possible animal patterns to put on some of Joe’s boxers?
Which of the many, many dolphin species?
I see a pattern of many dolphin species being unable to put on Joe’s boxers.
Between no hands and the size differential, it would be difficult at best.
“When you get right down to it, human beings are nothing more than ordinary jungle beasts. Savages. No different from the Cro Magnon people who lived twenty five thousand years ago. No different. Our DNA hasn’t changed substantially in a hundred thousand years. We’re still operating out of the lower brain. The reptilian brain. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. We like to think we’ve evolved and advanced because we can build a computer, fly an airplane, travel underwater, we can write a sonnet, paint a painting, compose an opera. But you know something? We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet. Barely out of the f***ing jungle. What we are, is semi-civilized beasts, with baseball caps and automatic weapons.”
– George Carlin, America’s philosopher
every species in the world has been evolving for the same amount of time, the bacteria living off of iron in deep in the Earth’s crust, human beings, and everything in between are ALL descended from the same self replicating cell that got put together from some proteins and lipid bubbles 3.9 billion years ago. Technically you can even say some random sample of brewers yeast is “more” evolved than we are because since I started typing this it went through a few generations that will take a long-lived organism like a human 60 years to catch up with.
So, I’m thinking that gesture of Joyce’s in the last panel (and in yesterday’s last panel) means: “I find this sight arousing but can’t deal with it.”
To be fair, that is a trick question that depends entirely on what your qualifiers for ‘highly evolved’ mean.
Do you mean it doesn’t particularly evolve all that much because it is already highly evolved? ‘Cause like, crocodiles and alligators have had their whole design down for a very long time.
Do you mean it has many many suitable adaptions or forms? Because we’ve got cats and dogs for that.
Do you mean it has evolved many many many times? Because bacteria, algae, viruses, fungi etc. evolve through inevitable mutation near constantly.
Do you mean what has the highest chance of survival in a new environment entirely regardless of where it is? Because that’d probably go to like rats as they adapt super quick.
It is only when you base your qualifiers specifically on things man can do that man is the answer and we’re not unique in many ways we claim to be. Animals have complex communication we just don’t understand. Animals have social skills and the ability to learn from mistakes. Animals have intelligence and empathy. They can play and do things for artistic reasons and recognise friends.
It IS a trick question, yes. The average person is likely to reply “Humans” and point to our intelligence, our technology, our culture and other creations. And to be fair, these are all amazing and wondrous creations. But evolution isn’t like a ladder or linear progression from least evolved to most evolved. It’s more like a highly complex, interlocking web, and some organisms which we might think of as being absurdly primitive have what are essentially superpowers to us. For instance, did you know that lobsters are effectively immortal unless killed? They don’t develop senescence (the fancy term for growing old); they just keep on getting bigger and bigger with no loss in strength or reproductive prowess. The only thing that holds them back is that eventually they get SO big that their natural biological processes aren’t equipped for dealing with such a big lobster and they basically get crushed to death when they can’t molt properly.
Every single organism on Earth that is alive today has been constantly evolving since the first of their species emerged. If they haven’t changed (much) from their prehistoric ancestor, it means that their current evolutionary state is still excellent at handling the life conditions they must live under. Ironically, we humans could actually reach a stage where we stop evolving because we instead rely on technology and cybernetics to plug the gap. (For example, if climate change continues and the world gets ever more hotter, it’s likely that people will resort to artificial cooling like air conditioners instead of simply evolving to better tolerate hotter temperatures through more efficient sweating or other mutations that allow us to lose heat faster.)
It’s obviously bear, eats all day, chills in the forest, sleeps for several months a year. You can’t find a more perfect form of life.
Thus far, less than 10% of everyone here have answered with any insight effectively identifying the purpose of the assignment. Thus far, it proves as an effective surrogate for the deepest thinkers in regard to biology.
i mean, this is a comment section, where being correct or profound is not necessarily rewarded.
and i do think some of the unscientific answers have been pretty funny.
If there is any “reward” to anyone, it goes to Professor Brock. It is proof that his assignment is effective as a tool for rooting out the deepest thinkers in his class. Or otherwise challenging then as an excellent intellectual excercise.
Joyce is definitely checking out dat ass.
Please let the correct answer be “shark” or “ants”.
It’s Water Bears. They can turn that in late and get a tardigrade.
This deserves recognition, a punitive reward of some kind.
*rolling on the floor laughing tardigrade emoji*
Say what you will about Joe, but he IS pretty hot.
The answer is Megazord, fuck science.
yes i guess you could sort of describe evolutionary biology as “fuck science”.
DNA is basically just LEGO anyway, so if I had to amend my original answer, I’d have to go with Bionicle as the ultimate evolution.
If I were given this assignment, I would insist that my lab partner and I spend an entire weekend constructing costumes of the news anchors from Futurama just so I could shout, “EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! GOOD NIGHT!”
I get that Willis intended to emphasize Joe’s azz, but boxer don’t fit that snugly, even briefs don’t, but those don’t really appear to be briefs….
We’re seeing what Joyce “sees” in this scene, I think . . . not what’s actually there.
Alternatively, Joe has his boxers specially tailored.
Maybe yours don’t.
If your briefs don’t fit that snugly you are buying the wrong size. They ideally shouldn’t be loose at all since that stops them riding up.
He got attacked by a Wedgiesoreass.
Doesn’t matter if it is a trick question or not, what does matter is how long the presentation is supposed to be. If they have to give a two minute presentation, or a ten minute presentation on then it will only take so long to prepare.
Joe: Joyce, my eyes are up here.
*Joyce looks up, blushes*
Joe: Further up.
*blushes redder*
Joe: FURTHER.
Joyce: Oh, thank God, there they are!
That question is meaningless. If that is NOT the answer, then, knowing Brock is a transhumanist, the answer is going to be Siri or Deep Blue or some shit.
It’s not America’s Ass, but its not a bad one either.
I was going to write my own comment but you summed it up pretty completely.
Oh come on, not Joe and Joyce *flipping table*
*kicks the table in midair and lands it perfectly upright*
The S.S. JoJo is unsinkable.
I suspect the correct answer is that “most highly evolved organism” is a highly subjective idea, and one tinted with human-centric bias. It’s a common misconception that evolution’s goal is to make people, to make us. Which means we’d be the most evolved.
Evolution doesn’t work like that, it’s about adapting to your environment. If I’d have to pick something, I’d pick something that’s hardly evolved for millions of years. Sharks and turtles and crocodiles are very well adapted to their environment. They existed when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and they exist now. Their continued existence is threatened by human activity though. The cockroach is far more resilient, and predates the dinosaurs. They will likely survive long after humans are gone. The tardigrade is even older and more relient. Maybe the tardigrade is the most highly-evolved organism.
At the same time, I don’t want to discount the emergent properties of sentience. Tardigrades are resilient, they have survival of the species well figured out. Would I rather be a tardigrade, though? Tardigrades aren’t aware of evolution or natural selection, they cannot ponder what it might mean to be the most highly-advanced organism. Not only can’t they sing, they cannot appreciate song, or art, or science, or philosophy. They cannot fathom the cuteness of a kitten or the majesty of a starlit sky. It would be nice to have the ability to fly like a bird, but I wouldn’t give up sentience for it.
I doubt the professor is looking for a specific answer anyway. He just wants the student to give a thoughtful answer.
I think you might be confusing sentience with conscience, or self-awareness, or some other word to describe the unique experience-of-being-me-ness of humans?
sentience is just the capacity for experiencing sensations, so birds are totally sentient
Sapience. What we named ourselves for.
it’s not a word i use, but the way wikipedia defines it sounds to me like that’s also not what Jason was going for? but idk maybe you go by a different definition i’m not aware of
I had always read and heard that word to describe beings of human-like intelligence/consciousness. If it doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, that’s annoying because I don’t know that another word does, and we should have a word for this. “Conscience” is too tied up in morality, “self-awareness” is too vague, “sapience” does have potential though.
That said, on the wikipedia page for sentience, it says: “In science fiction, the word ‘sentience’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘sapience’, ‘self-awareness’, or ‘consciousness’.” So the usage is maybe not wrong, and it’s just a different usage of the word? I feel like most of the time when I use this word in this context people understand what I mean, so until we get a better one I’ll probably keep using this one. Though “sapient” could work too. I might take it out for a spin someday, see how it feels.
Though in the context of a classroom, especially a science classroom, I’d be more careful about not using scientific term in their colloquial sense.
that’s fair, my experience with the word “sentient” is in the context of anti-speciesism/veganism discourse where it’s usually used as a shorthand for “animals whose subjective experience of sensation (including pain) we have no reason to think differs essentially from our own” based on anatomy etc.
I hadn’t realized that word was used differently elsewhere, so thanks for enlightening me and sorry for the nitpick, i did enjoy reading your meditation =)
So, here’s my twopence,
the problem with the question is that we even think that evolution is somehow cumulative, that there’s any sense that whatever exists now has been honed and perfected by millions of years of trial-and-error.
i think it’s worthwhile to try and see “evolution” as less of a process, because it’s just too tempting to see current organisms as the consequence, the end-result of that process.
Rather, “evolution” is really just a synonym for “history”. evolution is just, “this happened, and then this happened, and this happened next”.
Any group of individuals of any species, at any given point in the history of life, was adapted to their environment just fine. they weren’t early versions of what their descendants were eventually going to look like, that’s backwards logic. They weren’t somehow bound to fail, or bound to prosper, or bound to evolve dramatically, that’s just what it looks like from the point of view of a species with an exceptional taste for telling coherent stories.
also, when we talk about evolution we look at entire groups over millions of years, and that makes it easy to forget what evolution looks like on the ground, namely: it doesn’t. it’s not there. it’s an oversimplification for the purpose of drawing complicated genealogical trees. even “species” don’t actually exist, only lineages. are you “more evolved” than your grandma for having started to exist two generations later? no. no, you ungrateful punk.
As generations pass, some things are gained while other things are lost. The name of the game is variation, not progress.
So, “who is the most evolved” is like saying “who has had the most history”. and i think we should be skeptical of someone asking either question.
I think realising that question is flawed is the correct answer the teacher wants.
Well, the only way we can really discern species is between groups of organisms. Officially, organisms are of different species if their genetics are so different that they are unable to reproduce with each other.
Nonetheless, very good point(s) milu!
Not really officially. That’s more the pop science definition.
There are whole bunches of ways it breaks and it’s not even really a good way of thinking about the concept, since it leads to errors.
Basically species (like the higher orders of categorization) are artificial constructions we place around groups of organisms based on our understanding of their differences. Unable to reproduce is a good rule of thumb for many, but doesn’t even apply to asexually reproducing organisms and gets plenty fuzzy even with many closely related species that could interbreed, but don’t normally do so. Ring species, chronospecies. Canids. Horses/donkeys/mules. Tigers and lions.
It’s all a mess.
Exactly! thank you!
it should become obvious that “species” are abstractions when you ask yourself the question: “who was the first individual to no longer belong to (say) Homo erectus but count as Homo heidelbergensis?” clearly there will be no single answer. This is what thejeff has called a chronospecies: a species defined by arbitrary thresholds in time though there was no discontinuity from generation to generation in the actual populations.
yeah, the concept of species is wild! look it up Wagstaff
Evolved can just mean most acclimated to its environment, which would imply something that has remained recognizable for what it is for a really long time, like sharks… or a form that multiple evolutionary paths of evolved toward, like crabs (seriously there is a word for species becoming more crab like overtime, Carcinisation).
There is only one step to evolution and it is Crab
what are all these scientists still doing writing books and such. you can stop now, we’ve cracked it. it’s crabs
Wow, he’s going there just in his underwears
To be a successful organism, be small, smart, fast, breed profusely and be willing to eat anything. If you can get just three of those, you’re probably doing pretty well.
( also giant pandas are on the way out )
don’t be a giant panda. turns out that was a bad idea
Giant panda are the absolute suckiest. Apparently, the reason they’re so hard to breed in captivity is because the females don’t go into estrus unless they’re harassed by the male.
You know, I call bullshit on Mother Nature being this nurturing toga-wearing sweet lady like in Captain Planet. As far as I’m concerned she is a perpetually drunk Mad Scientist in a labcoat creating life forms for shits and giggles.
Sounds like my kind of date!
Don’t even get me started on giant pandas.
Spite being carnivores, they restrict themselves to only eating bamboo; and of that; only a specific kind of bamboo.
Of the bamboo they eat, only 2% is ever digested. The rest of it only serves to create routine assault to their alimentary canals.
As a result of poor nutrition and other factors, they really don’t have the energy to waste on attempting reproduction (not to mention the fact that among males, the size of a particular organ poses a special kind of problem in that regard.
Even if a female managed to have a baby, she’d probably kill it immediately, simply because she’s never seen one before.
All in all, had they been allowed to die, the Giant Pandas would have gone the way of the Dodo a long time ago.
Too many comments about evolution, not enough about Joe’s absolute dump truck ass
truly a pinnacle of evolution
Was gonna say that exact thing. I’m disappointed in this comment section.
At least Joyce is focusing on what matters.
Personally I am impressed with the erudition of (most of) the commenters.
The correct answer is Bacteria.
Or Viruses, depending on whether they’re considered organisms
Was my thought to that the “most evolved” could be judged based off the most steps of evolution, in which case the shortest generational time rules over all
I am going with Alligators. They reached perfection, and stopped evolving.
These last couple days have been Joyce discovering Joe is hot
They gonna fuuuuuck…
good gravy that’s a good arse