Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for March 18, 2011

We are evolving into Big Screens?

The scary thing is that, after we come to staring at ourselves, there’s no next step.

So forget asteroids, we’re doomed by… YouTube and Facebook? (Billions of years of evolution, and it ends with a power failure.)

I didn’t know we were descended from the platypus… or whatever that is between the the walking fish and the ape…

My wife thinks I evoloved into an ATM.

This just evolved into a summary of how women suck life forces from men thru an ATM….hmmm…accurate?

I Phones, I Pads etc are driving us to devolution and back into the ocean.

And at the top of the hill, about 1,000,000 pixels to the right, are the few who evolved the rare ability to ignore TV.

were bouncing back and forth from one end to another.

This is a good follow-on to yesterday’s strip.

Seriously, NOT all women consider a man to be an ATM. Just because you chose poorly don’t put a brand on half the world.

My husband thinks I evolved into an ATM.

You’re focused on the wrong item. Man didn’t evolve to watch TV; he evolved to hold the REMOTE.

Look how cunningly the hand is formed to grasp the odd shape (much as some say the banana was created to fit the human hand).

Benny Hill’s argument in favor of God:

When man was created, glasses hadn’t been invented yet; but look where He put our ears!

From man to Wii Avatar.

This one has depth beyond words. Only recently have I added a second cartoon to my must read of Non Sequitur. Bad Reporter would be appreciated by anyone who loves Non Sequitur.

did you know that a type of turtle was once the dominant species on Earth? Yummy yummy soups!

simply brilliant Wiley….

Kudos! Something about devolving to our lowest common denominator ?!? Or the Peter Principal – being promoted to one’s highest level of incompetence?

Evolution stops HERE!

I think the platypus has four legs. (What’s the plural of platypus anyway?)

Lemurs have either four legs, or two legs and two arms, depending upon one’s level of anthropomorhism.

Some kind of bird???

I apologize for any incoherencies, misspellings and such. I am in the throes of a sinus infection.

Echidna?

All darkforce and kreole yappers make idiotic generalizations.

batterie61: You are far too kind to kreole and darkforce. They are serious and they think that their generalizations are perfectly true.

My wife knows I’m an ATM; she tells me! I’m the only one who makes a paycheck in the family. But I wouldn’t trade her for another. She has to put up with me and she does a good job of that.

ATM? My husband is so tight with his money, I had to go out to work, just so we could have paint on the walls.

I can’t complain though. Over 37 years we have developed a symbiotic relationship. He pays for the roof over our head. I pay for most of what goes under the roof, including the food on the table.

When the world crashes in, into my living room Television made me what I am People like to put the television down But we are just good friends (I’m a) television man.

“Television Man”, Talking Heads

Evolved into virtual reality. Thus we no longer real exist as a human race.

Looking closely, it seems to me that the animal between the coelacanth and the simian is intended to be seen as four-legged, not two; only the near legs are shown, and they’re set close enough together that the misreading is understandable. My guess is that it’s a long-snouted mammal (or protomammal).

(By the way, there’s no exclusively-correct plural of “platypus”; two platypi, two platypuses, and two platypus are all acceptable. If you have six, you can have a pair of each!)

If I recall, before his death Stephen Jay Gould did a column in Natural History on the “March of Evolution” meme in comics. Most of all, he rejected its idea of progress or intent leading to the apex that is humanity in its present form.

I agree with Gould’s point, bmonk, but it’s still a useful trope for comics. Did Gould condemn the image, or was he just pointing out the discrepancy? (I didn’t read the column you cite, but I’ve read him on the broad subject of the “non-directedness” of evolution. Still, he strikes me as having had enough of a sense of humor not to get his knickers in too much of a twist over it. You might reject the Genesis account of creation, but Adam and Eve in Eden still makes for some good cartoons.)

Every species is a transitional form, somewhere between what it once was (which we can trace, to greater or lesser degree) and what it will be (about which we can only speculate). When two lines branch off the same stock, there’s no need for either to stop developing.

Platypuses and echidnae (their fellow monotremes) are particularly intriguing because, being oviparous and cloacal as well as warm-blooded, lactating and fur-bearing, they strongly suggest how the split between modern reptiles and modern mammals came about. That doesn’t make their modern forms “transitional” between reptiles and mammals, but it’s indicative of a “middle path” from the same starting point.

How about the progression from eohippus to modern horses? We have LOTS of intermediary steps in the fossil record for that. There’s no reason to expect that the fossil record would be more complete than it is, because fossilization does not occur under all conditions. There’s no guiding intelligence trying to leave behind a complete chain for our human intelligences to piece together. Nonetheless, fossils from 100,000 years ago are different from the species of today, fossils in the 1,000,000-year range differ still further, fossils from the 10,000,000-year range differ still further, and so on. Yet we can clearly trace the progression of forms between then and now.

“Punctuated equilibrium” argues that a large population, well-adapted to its environment, will remain evolutionarily stable for long periods of time; the gene pool is varied, intermixing occurs freely, and there’s an absence of outside stressors to cull the “unfit”. Evolutionary change within the species occurs slowly, if at all. If a segment of the population becomes isolated, either through migration/expansion or geologolical or environmental change, adaptation proceeds rapidly within the species, both as a result of the limited numbers and of increased selective forces from the environment. It’s speculated, although not proven, that under environmental stress the genetic variation from generation to generation rises, and as there’s no need for a guiding intelligence to bring that about (if there were a guiding intelligence involved, it seems to me that only strains which are MORE fit would arise, and that does not seem to be the case), likewise this would result in more rapid and more drastic changes in a shorter period of time (“shorter” being a relative term; we may still be talking about thousands and thousands of YEARS, if not generations, to bring about relatively SIGNIFICANT change to the population).

None of this is “proven”, nor can it be said to be “self-evident”; nonetheless, it’s so intuitively plausible that it would take Divine Intervention for Evolution by Natural Selection NOT to occur.

Again, by the time Darwin published “Origin of Species”, it was already accepted by scientists (if not by Churchmen) that the earth was vastly older than 6,000 years AND that species had changed over time. That evolution HAS occured is as solid as anyone might wish, given that we’re dealing with the geological/paleontological record of past events that we can’t witness first hand. If you deny that, you’ll be taken as seriously as an astronomer arguing that the moon is made of cheese.

The only question on which there can POSSIBLY be any debate is what is driving the mechanism of evolution. Darwin, a devout man who nonetheless would not blind himself with received dogma, saw in Natural Selection the Hand of God, not in a specific motive for the creation of human beings, but in ordering of the universe such that strictly by its own uninterrupted workings it created life in all its present (and past) diversity. If later theorists look at the same process and see no need for (or positive evidence OF) a Divine Intelligence, a First Mover who set the works in motion, well, that’s just Occam’s Razor. If you get the same result with God or without God, why presume God?

After the breakup of Pangaea, Australia was connected to South America, while North America and South America were separated. The geological record shows that.

Marsupials were the dominant form of mammal on this combined land mass, although a few straggling monotremes held on (there and nowhere else). The fossil record shows that marsupials used to be found throughout what is now South America.

When Australia and South America split, and the land bridge between North America and South America formed, the canids and the felids and the other non-marsupial mammals that had arisen and thrived in North America spread southward; neither the native herbivorous nor carnivorous marsupials could compete with the Northern immigrants, and now the only marsupials which are left on the planet are those which were safely isolated on Australia (along with those wacky monotremes). The sole exception being the North American opossums, who found save haven by migrating north, and hanging on (by their tails) for dear life.

We’re not just talking about individual species; we’re talking about huge classes of animalia (marsupials being not quite as bizarre as monotremes, but compared to other mammalia they’re still quite freaky) that come in contact with other huge classes of animalia, and prevail (or not) contingent upon their “fitness” for survival.

The geological record does not prove the fossil record, nor does the fossil record prove the geological record. But that the two reinforce one another is telling.

What’s the alternative? God saying “I’m going to put the only monotremes in Australia, and all the marsupials, except these opossums. I’m gonna put these in North America, with the wolves and the bison and the coyotes, where the deer and the antelope play.” If not God, was it Noah? Were the opossums playing dead when he made landfall in Sydney, and he neglected to disembark them until he hit New Orleans?