- Illustration: Evolutionary tree
- Caption: Homo erectus
- Caption: Homo neanderthalensis
- Caption: Homo sapiens
- Note: Homo larisas
- Sandra: You’re NOT the next step of human evolution!
- Larisa: One cannot deny evolutionary facts, you religious zealot!
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![[0457] Evolution II](/comics/2013-02-21-0457-evolution-ii.png "[0457] Evolution II")
[0457] Evolution II
└ posted on Thursday, 21 February 2013, by Novil
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Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
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Sandra, Woo and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” 😀
Diabetic, pyromaniac, artistic, extremely appealing and sarcastic humourous – Larissa is definitely the coolest step of evolution, and i’m both fearing and hoping she’s the first specimen of the next sapiens evolution step…
Is she saying she wants the whole species to die in an insane blaze of glory…? o_o Because that is what i think a world of Larisas would do.
…
I’m scared now.
Homo erectus discovered fire.
Homo sapiens developed its usage.
Homo larisas loves fire… too much.
Yeah, seems legit.
Something’s not right here, because it’s populations that evolve, not individuals. Unless– Larisa has found a way to self-replicate. Run for your lives!
Yes.
Simply, yes.
Shouldn’t there be a «homo sapiens sapiens»? Just out of curiosity…
@ Sambo:
Homo sapiens sapiens designated homo sapiens when homo neanderthalensis was called homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
*Larisa: Tapes another slip to the tree*
Sandra: “How am I descended from slime mold?!”
Larisa: “Aren’t all religious zealots so?”
This is incorrect, after homo erectus was homo cro magnun, some of whom lived alongside neanderthals in certain areas and interbred with them in the case of all non-africans… THEN homo sapien. You guys skipped a step!
I’ve actually examined the science behind evolution and I can say with a good deal of authority that there’s almost as much science in evolution as there is in Star Trek, and it’s about as accurate.
(/beeinbonnetmode)
But Larissa adding non-canon notes to the evolutionary chart is still funny. 🙂
*Goes back to comment on previous comic, reads over the guesses he made about the events of this comic, then comes back* That works too! 😛
And in number 3, Woos gonna sneak in and place himself as the next step for racoons, or Sandra will do it. Or is anyone actually thinking that a talking and fully sentient freaking racoon ISN’T the next step?
@ Sambo:
Re: Homo-Sapiens-SAPIENS…
I came to ask about that, myself. I’m not surprised by this omission, though. Most people don’t know the difference.
I have a feeling Homo Larisas would go extinct. They have a distinct reckless streak… and a tendancy to use fire for everything. Who needs a meteor strike… when you can just set the whole planet on fire?
Meh … just duct tape your own name tag over hers and show her who’s the boss of the neighborhood. 🙂
@ Mayliw:
If diabetic is the next step to evolution, then, woe on us.
Frozenwolf150 wrote:
Not really… population and species and terms like that are completly artificial constructs of mankind. Why do we use them? Well because calling something “wolf” is infinitely easier than describing everytime the properties of that beeing.
generaly the term covers quite broad variety of beeings with different parametrs, albeit statisticaly these would oscilate around “ideal” wolf… some individuals will have parameters more suited to survive in given enviroment, some of them less suited.
Question which are more likely to succesfuly surive and propagate (passing these traits on) has extremly simple answer.
Now aplly this slow change for a 2 thousand years of selective breeding and you can turn a GREY WOLF into a dog called Yorkshire terier… or penineese… none of which can sucesfully procreate with the original grey wolves who still survive in the wild.
However take away humans feeding them and Yorkshires will be unable to feed themselves. They were shaped by force of nature- humans and can live pretty well in enviroment which feeds them because they are “cute”… (that does not work for grey wolf, even if I find them more elegant beeings by far, and would feed rather them than yorkshires if what I consider “cute” would be decisive factor in the enviroment)
Evolution progresses even on level of indiviual beeings… the end result we measure is mostly statistical and is determined by what factors simply eliminated some traits from given species over time.
Anyone who still thinks that current “average of traits” of human kind is the same as two thousand or ten thousand years ago is delusional. We are higher, pack greater intelect (some), are a bit physicaly weaker (at least some races where survival was based more on need to think than on pure physical strength)…
Melkior wrote:
Whose authority? And btw if you can´t see science behind Star trek that does not mean it is not there…
Warp drive is nothing but Alcubieere drive, (in fact term of folding space around ship was sooner in fiction), inertial damper is based on assumptions that all fields are equivalent… if you can force matter to emit localized EM field, why not force it to make gravitic field?
Cloaking is realized on microscopic scale even now (albeit using polarized materials not simply energy field)…
People like Isaac Asimov, Gene Rodenbery, A.C Clark and Robert Heinlein did tremendous job in dreaming up possibilities one can actualy research.
Anyone who can say “the next step in evolution” without wincing does not have the faintest idea what the words “evolution by natural selection” mean. Optimisation functions have no objectives – natural selection has no end in sight, it just favours those that breed best. Evolution does not care about what you think is good. It doesn’t care about anything. It’s a process, not a person.
Melkior wrote:
Ha, ha, ha. No. If you mean that you’ve read On the Origin of Species, what you’re saying is roughly equivalent to “I’ve read Newton and he was WRONG! Clearly gravity is a lie!”. Charles Darwin died over a hundred years ago. Evolutionary theory has improved quite a lot since then.
Actually, you can, Larisa. The United Nations specifically says so.
I believe “Evolutionary Theory” is defined as something roughly like “A slow, steady change in a species over time”
While I can see this in certain things (Giant Ground Sloth to Three Toed Sloth, Archiopterix to Eagle, Short-Face Bear to Brown Bear) There re other things that I simply have to question. For instance, supposedly Chickens descend from Tyranosaurus Rex. A change just a bit more drastic than Megolodon to Great White. Show me a transition species and maybe I’ll call it viable.
Cro-Magnen were Homo Sapien, by the way. Why call them “Cro-Magnen” instead of “Humans”? Well, because for all intents and purposes, Neanderthals were humans as well. Just a different breed. Much like how Red Foxes and Arctic Foxes both fall under “Fox”
Now, as for the viability of Homo Larisas being the next stage in evolution after Homo Sapien… Yeah, I’d say that sounds about right. World would be a little more interesting, anyway. Is it bad that her latest antics make me wanna help her out with spreading this new species?
Heh. Who knew you could treat real life like Wikipedia ….
She’s the next Magneto!
Anonym wrote:
THERE IS nothing like “transitory species” (all T-rexes died out when ecosystem of this planet suffered two shortly following disasters- masive vulcanic activity when india crashed into Asia, and then (dealing the final blow to heat-loving great lizzards an asteroid rammed the planet).
Unless you have time machine I simply do not have that many fossils to measure change in every succesive generation which is in some traits always different from previous one. Fossilization is rather a rare process. Most of biomatter simply decays.
There we have few records of some pteropods which managed to survive vulcanic and astoroid cataclysm which during million years gradualy went from one “bird” form to another and on different places of the planet simply succesive populations diverged so much that it was classified as new species.
We do not call new generation new species… but few millenia at least for clasification purposes would be quite fine to proclaim something and verify and measure diferences in populations.
If she is the next step in evolutionary chain, I’m not having any kids!
@ Paeris Kiran:
Yes, I know all that. However, when it comes to discussing the plausibility of a reproductively isolated group of diabetic artistic sardonic pyromaniacs, peer-reviewed citations are hard to come by.
Larisa is the best! 😀
And I think a few people are WAY over thinking a comic with a talking raccoon in which a 12 year old girl declares herself a superior form of life, particularly as the previous comic had her declaring another girl as descended from flatworms!
Guys, relax, you’ll find it does wonders for your blood pressure.
Aw Larissa. The only person that reminds me of a minecraft freind. Who is ever infamous for causing gaint explosions or fireballs where ever he goes.
Melkior wrote:
Ahahaha.
Oh wait, you were serious.
Let me laugh even harder.
Please allow me to direct you to Dina, who will speak for me:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/02-guess-whos-coming-to-galassos/proven/
Eric wrote:
Hello and welcome.
You must be new to the internet. ^^ This kind of stuff happens all the time over here.
An impulsive pyromaniacal diabetic performance artiste . . . hey, better than those boringly angst-ridden drama queen X-men!
@ demarion:
Well I did some overthinking… adding “homo” infront of one´s name… around 12 year old classmates is not exactly a good idea if I think about it…
though girls are likely to get away with it quite easily…
@ Robert:
Oh, they wouldn’t just go extinct! They’d take all the other species down with them, probably in one, big, beautiful Insanly Overpowered Fireball.
@ Rock:
LOL! Fair point, but I still like to poke people for such displays of silliness.
If I may say, evolution itself is not fact. Even though I am religious( not zealous ), I don’t beleive evolution is impossible. What I’m saying is that evolution has yet to be scientifically proven and thus is not FACT but still theory.
Clockwork Alchemist wrote:
How about believing your eyes… you can get veritable result on crossbreeding bees or dogs… with bees or some plants you can actualy get new species (or at least sub-species) result during your lifetime…
@ Melkior:
Just out of curiosity, what are your credentials?
@ Drakefire:
I it safe to assume that you’re Talking about Gamechap and birdie ….? XD
@ Frozenwolf150:
If corporations can be people, than people can be populations.
Since there’s some interest I’ll say my bit about evolution and then shut up because it’s only marginally on-topic for this cartoon strip.
Evolution as the origin of life requires simple, dead matter to spontaneously become complex, living matter without any intelligent direction. Science has proven that this doesn’t happen (Second Law of Thermodynamics, for example). And before someone says “but that’s not true when you have excess energy to drive evolution, such as from the sun”, excess energy without direction always accelerates the rate of decay.
You need either stored direction (such as DNA or RNA) or direct intervention by an intelligent being ( whether that’s God or a human) before excess energy can be used to reverse entropy.
Related to the above:
Evolution by mutations in DNA or RNA requires mutations to cause an increase in genetic information, but science has proven that mutations always lose information and never gain information, so mutations can only produce devolution, never evolution.
Evolution by mutation is frequently quoted as the foundation of evolution but since it’s beyond implausible, I choose not to believe in it.
Every time someone has come up with an argument which seems to support evolution, I’ve always discovered a (sometimes glaringly obvious) scientific reason why the argument must be false.
I’m willing to reconsider, if someone comes up with a scientifically plausible way for evolution to exist, but so far nobody has.
I hate to say this because no matter how I put it, it’s going to offend some people and I don’t want to cause offense, but I think it needs to be said: It seems to me that a lot of people who insist evolution exists are basing their belief not on science but on the precept that “God doesn’t exist therefore evolution must exist since life couldn’t exist any other way”.
Or more simply, people believe in evolution because they want to, regardless of evidence or lack of it.
I hope I’m wrong about that, because the thought of so many people being so blindly biased depresses me.
Finally, I apologise to anyone I’ve offended, but that’s my opinion and I’m willing to defend it, at least against rational arguments.
@ Nokota:
Actually, human evolutionary process looks closer to
. Also, l’homme de Cro-Magnon (pardon my French, I’m not sure this is the correct spelling) is just another name for Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
But seeing as this is a webcomic, not a scientific thesis, I’m not sure how all this information matters at all.
Cheers!
@ B.:
Apologies again. I’m afraid I’m quite useless at this.
Link: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_33Qbbld15E/Tq8JR_8yyJI/AAAAAAAADgs/GjTT0CHlT3U/s1600/evolucion-de-los-hominidos-en-infografia-00.gif
If a moderator would be so kind as to delete my previous message, I’d be grateful.
Cheers!
Melkior wrote:
You are babling nonsense mostly based on lack of undestanding reality…
First- second law of thermodynamics concerns universe as whole, generaly entropy increases, but since this planet exists within energy gradient, and there are only finite ways how to emit energy it has possibility of capturing some of that energy emited from the sun and storing them within structures which are at least meta-stable… even those however decay if the energy gradient they live of vanishes. No violation of 2nd law of thermodynamics. You have just forgotten to take into account that magnificient ball of fusing hydrogen emiting lot of energy our planet orbits.
And yes… for the evolutionary process of living beings one does actualy need living beings else there is nothing to describe- that is actualy why evolution does not describe how the simplest forms of life came to be… only how after that came to be they change over time.
And contrary to your opinion mutations can increase “usefull” information… replacing perhaps some outdated viral implant into DNA our body is not using anyway by perhaps making it able to create a protein inhibiting HIV virus… Granted statisticaly loss of useful information is more likely, but as those beings are generaly unviable to survive in enviroment these changes are not propagated forward.
And as for how first self propagating things came to exist? DNA and RNA are based of materials which this planet had tremendous abundance of and it´s atmosphere and seas packed orders of magnitude of higher concetration… for some time our planet looked more like Venus… with magnificent piles of goo, everlasting thunderstorms, and vulcanic activity beyond anything that existed in last billion years.
All you need are some peptides to form a membrane, and some atoms to form at least elemental chain of molecules in pores matter… there is “life” that actuly does not need cels… influenza (flu)virus is only an RNA string perfectly capable to exist in enviroment in some conditions. There are viril strings of DNA in enviroment we actualy have not seen interacting with anything (they cant- incompatible with DNA of anything we know)
It takes time, but even chimpanzee using typewriter has a chance (negligable one) to write Hamlet by accident.
Just because you’ve evolved a different species doesn’t make you better than the rest of the genus. There’s a single-celled organism that evolved from humans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Helacyton_gartleri
@ Paeris Kiran:
Yes, but did those “species” result from a change within the origin species, and does that breed have a new trait that is benenficial to the entire species which is not in the gene pool of the original parents? All I’m saying is it still has yet to be proven. My point is Larisa said,” One cannot simply deny evolutionary fact…”. That is false because evolution is still a theory. So to sum up, my entire point is hinged on the fact that evolution is still theory and thus what Larisa said is false. I am not denying evolution possibility or accepting it as fact.
Wolfking_Warrior wrote:
I’m sorry if this offended anybody.
Clockwork Alchemist wrote:
The trait will be beneficial to entire species only after it will disseminate into progenty and expand. it will take few generations, and it won´t be fast if other beeings manage to survive and propagate- with fact that the “enhancement” is not the determining factor of propagation.
We can change it artificialy (aka genetic engeniering), we have viruses that can “implant” some specific DNA to already living cells of human body (ve changed them, they transcribed something else)…
In this respect genetic information of adult beeing can actualy change, wheather it is benefitial or damaging… well that will be determined by beigs survival and propagation.
It is classical trial and error aproach. The one and only real scientific method.
In before comment lockdown. ¬_¬
.
Larisa isn’t necessarily wrong. BUT there are a few things she needs to keep in mind:
#1. Being “the next stage” doesn’t make her objectively better in any sense. At the most it would imply she was more efficiently adapted to her particular environment.
#2. If she is capable of producing viable offspring with homo sapiens, she can’t viably be defined as a new species. HOWEVER, behavioural barriers to such things are legitimate claims to incapability. AND YET if she is the only member of her species and has none other to breed with, her species is going extinct the moment she dies. It is a bit of a no-win situation for her species.
.
Anyhows… I’m going to conveniently ignore the argument that was taking place above. Trying to show creationists how bloody stupid they are is an exercise in futility.
@ Melkior:
Warp Drive is actually possible.