43 thoughts on “Dilbert: On the origin of tetrapods”

    1. That would be exceedingly hard to imagine, given some of the Dilbert cartoons I’ve read.

      His Wikipedia article, in the section “Personal Life,” doesn’t even mention religion. It does say he’s a vegetarian, and quotes him as saying “On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff”

  3. Adams quote: “If you are new to the Dilbert Blog, I remind you that I don’t believe in Intelligent Design or Creationism or invisible friends of any sort. I just think that evolution looks like a blend of science and bullshit, and have predicted for years that it would be revised in scientific terms in my lifetime. It’s a hunch – nothing more.”

    2. And besides rejecting biology, IIRC the other reason to think him a creationist, or at least influenced by them, was that he used creationist arguments.

      1. “, was that he used creationist arguments.”

        I’ve known a number of people who weren’t particularly religious and claimed not to be creationists, but still 1) used creationists arguments against evolution and naturalism, and 2) had great antipathy towards noted atheists.

        I’m not sure what to call these people.

          1. Kurt Vonnegut was an atheist who didn’t believe in natural selection. He said something like, “When I look at fireflies, I just can’t picture any sort of family fight that leaves the winners with the ability to make their butts light up.” He didn’t say what, if anything, he did think happened.

          3. Argumentum ex incredulum.
            (The argument from incredulity ; doesn’t cut ice from a good SF author any more than it does from an unpasteurised pastor.
            That last one is fresh, out of whole cloth. And it projects an interesting concept.

    3. It is still a funny cartoon, even though one can read a little mockery into it I have no problem with chuckling over the absurdities of what evolution has made. Fishes with legs! That is begging for a little ribbing, is it not?

  4. Reminds me of the running joke in “Sponge Bob Square Pants”. In nearly every episode, some fish will get caught in a terrible accident and yell, “My leg! My leg!”

    1. Everything about Sponge Bob is absurd. It is brilliant, and there are so many weird things in it that somehow make sense in cartoon world.
      I am looking forward to their new CG movie.

  5. On a related subject, a turtle phylogeny was just published. It places turtles closer to dinosaurs, crocodilians, and birds than to lizards and snakes.

    1. Yes. A link to that is here. I have not had time to look carefully, but I guess it is a refinement of an earlier revision about turtles. They used to be classified as belonging to an archaic group of reptiles called anapsids (where they are still classified in many textbooks). But more recent developmental and genetic studies had elevated them to be amongst the diapsid reptiles. Turtles are still totally weird, no matter what.

      2. This study corroborates a similar study from 2012, and contradicts some other earlier studies. The Wikipedia page for turtles needs updating in the phylogenetics section.

  6. Scott Adams has some weird and incorrect notions about evolution, resulting in weird and incorrect critiques of evolution and attempts to satirize evolutionary theory that kind of fall flat because it’s evident that he’s working from some serious misconceptions.

    See the strip about the dinosaur that has a wart that it thinks will become an eye (that’s the gist of it, it’s been a while since I’ve read it).

    1. Pretty much doesn’t accept evolution as a fact because it sets off his “bullshit filter”. He has put a number of blog posts which show his lack of understanding on the topic.

      Has used Pascal’s wager to argue that atheists are dogmatic, I assume he is going with the XKCD agnostic position to feel superior to both theists and atheists.

  8. Last year, about this time, Scott Adams’ father was dying.Scott Adams wrote the following, in all seriousness, about it:
    http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/i_hope_my_father_dies_soon/

    I can’t tell from this whether Scott is a religionist or a secularist, a creationist or an evolutionist, but I can tell that he was
    against the governmental torture of his dying father.

    Scott Adams has written two “non-Dilbert, non-humor” books, “God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment”” and “The Religion War”. They are not great literature, but they are interesting as expressions of Scott Adams’ thinking.

  9. I’m in the middle of the series “Your Inner Fish” hosted by Neil Shubin (via Netflix)and that only makes this Dilbert comic all the more funny if not outright hilarious.

    JJB

    1. I’ve just finished Neil Shubin’s book and I agree 100%.

      Except that I’m not sure if I’m laughing at Scott Adams, or at him. Oh yeah – it’s at him.

  10. I felt the need to cite Dilbert recently, as someone in the office was explaining at length how to re-boot one of several routers.
    Certain people will know which cartoon I’m thinking of without following the link.

    1. I half-remember a single-panel Dilbert cartoon — perhaps it was a greeting card… The character (I think it was Dogbert) is holding a baseball bat, standing in front of a desktop computer that he has just smashed to pieces. The caption says “The network is down, but I’m feeling much better.”

      2. Way back when I was a little kid, long before Dilbert, someone in my dad’s office had a sign with a picture of a guy holding a huge sledgehammer over a computer and the caption “hit any key to continue.”

          1. Somehow computers and sledgehammers go together well.

            We had a particularly ornery leased Xerox machine at our old school, which always gave out around exam time. The Xerox repair guy practically lived at our school.. The idea was put forward to allow teachers, for $10, to have a go with a sledgehammer and possibly raise enough to buy our own. Got nixed by the principal.

          3. Printers & photocopiers and I have a complicated relationship. I try not to print anything because I either lose the print out or I end up in some fight with the printer.

      3. I won’t go into details, but after pulling a client’s business plan out of trouble, and getting thoroughly abused in the process (I restrained myself from punching the offending poisonous little dwarf of a supervisor, but having recently met another veteran of the same job, she wasn’t sure if I was going to punch the guy before or during his heart attack ; when I heard that he’d been sacked a year later for having “an unacceptable attitude to safety”, I burst out laughing. I believe he’s working in Vietnam these days) … We came back from that job, and I took the racks of computer equipment and smashed them with a sledgehammer before throwing them into a skip (errr, EN_US : dumpster?). We had been planning on scrapping that service before hand, but there are times when destroying the equipment is the best option.
        In the 6 weeks of that job, that poisonous little dwarf went through almost 80 personnel. On 2-week rotations, only one person returned to the rig. There was a 5 day hiatus (costing nearly 1million quid) when one of the other contractors had to import a work crew from America because every one of their UK/ Europe/ Middle East staff had heard about the job and that it was pure poison, so refused to go. We had 3 staff saying “Send me there and I quit. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

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