The cartoon that has it all

August 23, 2015 • 11:10 am

As reader Ben Goren said when sending me this Non Sequitur strip by Wiley Miller, it has it all: evolution, faith, and cats!

nq150822

 

But it also shows one of Americans’ most common misconceptions about evolution: that what evolves are individuals over their lifetimes, not populations over long periods of time. This is a common misunderstanding of how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, giving rise to the idea that individuals somehow acquire a physiological tolerance to the drugs.

42 thoughts on “The cartoon that has it all”

  3. The brother of the misunderstanding of evolution is the misunderstanding of mutation and the many wrong movies it has created. It has annoyed me since I was a child. I think I must’ve been a really tedious child.

        1. But I still enjoy those movies! 🙂

          Of course, being a non-scientist helps me ignore it. Give me a movie where the history is wrong, like Braveheart, and it annoys the hell out of me.

          1. For me, there are two basic directions it can go that it works.

            First is what’s typically called, “hard SF.” The work is speculative and goes beyond what we know how to do today, but doesn’t step over the line into that which we know is impossible. Chances are good that, within a decade or three, it’ll be obsolete one way or another, but that I don’t mind.

            The other is unapologetic fantasy. It makes no pretenses about having any bearing on reality and is often very much upfront and / or in-your-face about it.

            Where I start to have a problem is with something that tries or purports to be realistic but fails miserably…and that’s all too common. The perfect example would be something set in the present that uses technology that doesn’t even remotely exist (some “secret government project”) to do something absurd (“Enhance!“). Even then, I can give a pass to an over-the-top B movie…that would fall back into the “unapologetic fantasy” category.

            Also very annoying is when somebody takes something obviously fantastic and tries to make it plausibly realistic — with the all-time worst example of that being the Force in Star Wars farcically re-engineered as a sentient race of minty chloroform microbes that gave Darth Vader a prophesied Jesus-style virgin birth. No; fuck that shit. The Force is a mystical magical mercurial energy field in an unreal universe, period, full stop.

            Cheers,

            b&

          2. I liked your link to ‘Enhance’. Any time anyone says that in those pseudo-detective-but-actually-low-grade-scifi shows, the needle on my BS detector starts hovering around the red line and usually shortly thereafter hits the stop with a whack.
            It’s fitting that they included a McGyver (“Got a image enhancer that can bitmap this stuff?” – which is gobbledegook). McGyver was an early proponent of gratuitously making anything technical as ludicrous as possible. I’ll swear they did it to drive me insaaaaaaane. 🙁

            cr

          4. Yeah but – Get Smart was intended as a spoof. I could happily watch idiocies like the Cone of Silence.

            McGyver pretended to be some sort of adventure show, just that his ‘ingenious’ ideas weren’t spoofs (they probably looked okay if you were mechanically clueless) but every single one was gratuitously stupid to anyone with home-handyman level of knowledge or better.

          5. You mean you can’t make a rocket launcher out of a drain pipe and a box of match heads? What a let down. But what about the marbles in a vacuum hose set on blow? Now that you can not deny!

          6. Rocket launcher / drain pipe reminds me of something…

            A friend of mine who was a gun collector / history nut had a US Army WW2-vintage book on improvised weapons. Some of them were truly McGyver. I think the Army had got a lot of draftees, shut them up somewhere and told them to use their imagination. It’s probably classified now.

            Anyway, one of their devices was a ‘gun’ made from a length of pipe, some suitable propellant (stuff like that is lying around on the battlefield all the time, right?), loaded with whatever missiles came to hand. Line ‘gun’ up, light the touch hole, blast the enemy. Recoil? They thought of that. Their propellant was in the middle of the pipe and you packed a similar-weight reaction charge behind it and – this was important – DO NOT STAND BEHIND GUN WHEN FIRING.

            My favourite was ‘Extending the range of a grenade’. This also required extending its fuse time. So – you take the grenade, remove the pin while holding the lever (do NOT drop the grenade!), and enlarge the pin hole with your army knife so a 6″ length of fuse is a snug fit, while your comrades watch in awe (or terror, if they’ve got any sense). You then tie a piece of string round the grenade and lever, light the fuse, stand up and whirl the grenade around your head (taking care not to hit one of your comrades behind the ear with it, and relying on the element of surprise to avoid the enemy just shooting you) and let go the string when it is travelling in the approximate direction of the enemy.

            McGyver would be proud. I’d be running.

          7. …something set in the present that uses technology that doesn’t even remotely exist…

            Like every episode of 24. I still watched it but it was just so wrong, most of it was just fantasy. Even the politics were off in the latest season.

  4. The wonder of evolution is that it is so easy to explain and understand. Either it’s not taught properly or the opposed mind refuses to accept it.

    1. It’s a bit of both. I think most creationists don’t understand evolution properly, but they do understand the philosophical consequences of evolution. With evolution, mankind isn’t the cherry on the pie, the crown of creation. We’re part of the animal kingdom and not unique. That realization is too much to bear for the creationist.

      1. Seems like the Creationists are using religion as a comfort blanket. How many religious people have simply refused to grow up spiritually?

        1. I don’t know what it means to grow up spiritually, but to me it’s a matter of humility and knowing one’s place in the universe. The very day that pope Francis got elected, he was called humble. I’ve always been very surprised about pope Francis being called humble. The office of pope is by definition incompatible with humility.

          1. Ah ha! You DO know what it is to grow up spiritually. You’ve said it in one word! Also trying to put the ‘golden rule’ into practice!

          2. I’m sorry, I was unclear. The matter of evolution is a matter of humility and knowing one’s place in the universe. I wasn’t talking about growing up spiritually. I don’t believe in spirits or souls.

    2. But it isn’t easy really. Especially to the ones who have been reading all that Creationist claptrap that sounds scientific.

  6. Wait. The last common ancestor of goldfish and piranhas was a bazillion years ago. Besides, if the goldfish can talk, why not just negotiate? Cat’s can be reasonable.

    1. With all the real big numbers why do people still use made up ones? Part of our intellectual problem.

      1. Sorry, try, the last common ancestor of carp and piranhas was 127.2 Mya (median, 12 studies)
        So, about 1/10,000 of a Bazillion.

        1. Why throw in a gratuitous fake when the real is at hand? You are just feeding that particular peeve and it is growing Godzilla size by how. Next time don’t use DNA use XNY instead for a similar feel.

          1. It is a form of communication that conveys much more meaning than merely stating a technically correct number.

            It doesn’t peeve me and I am not concerned at all if someone else becomes peeved about yet another someone else using a made-up number in a clearly non-technical context.

            I am not sorry that it peeved you, but I am a bit sad that you aren’t able to appreciate forms of communication that are less than technically correct. For example, much of art consists of just that. And someone incapable of appreciating all the art that entails is more than enough to warrant some sadness, let alone the issues with going through life having to communicate with people like rickflick and me.

            If you don’t approve of humor or satire, well insert eye roll here. If you didn’t notice that the comment was intended to be humorous and satirical, that would surprise me because it was really obvious.

    2. No, there’s nothing reasonable when there is something moving that must be caught. Nothing.

  9. I like it! But, Jerry, while it isn’t evolution, bacteria do acquire resistance during their lifetimes – consider a plain old coliform chillin’ on a hospital room floor. It cosies up to a methicillin resistant staph, and the next thing you know a plasmid has been exchanged and the coliform is reborn hard, as an extended spectrum beta lactamase coliform. In just a moment it has acquired the whole suite of resistances coded on the plasmid. It’s just like buying a hotel in Monopoly. All of a sudden you are more formidable.

    1. Actually it is Evolution since bacteria have short life spans and fast reproduction. It just seems less, because they could go through 100 generations before we live a month.

      1. nightgaunt49

        I think you have misunderstood lancelotgobbo’s point. The OP implies that it is a mistake to think that ‘individuals somehow acquire a physiological tolerance.’ But in fact they do. Individual bacteria acquire resistance to antibiotics, often multiple resistance to several antibiotics, not by genetic mutation but by receiving DNA from other bacteria, bacteria that already possess resistance. Of course mutation and selection happen as well but they would not be enough on their own to account for the spread of resistance in bacteria.

        1. It was the over prescription of antibiotics, in our food and the fact it wasn’t strong enough to kill all of the bacteria so there were survivors. Many of them given accidental vaccinations that strengthened successive generations. Even without exchange of DNA is my point. Much larger problem.

    2. I am not positive but I think Jerry was referring to humans with “. . . the idea that individuals somehow acquire a physiological tolerance to the drugs,”
      statement.

      1. some of us do with a few, others are just common like cocaine and caffeine.Take too much for too long and you will have a tolerance to its effect, yet your body will crave it still.

  11. ” it also shows one of Americans’ most common misconceptions about evolution:”

    There’s a (possibly unintended) suggestion there that Wiley Miller might share that misconception. Given the number of times Wiley has referenced evolution in his cartoons, I’d assume he probably does understand it. This one might suggest otherwise but cartoons are not meant to be taken literally. (Like, we know it’s wrong but we still get the joke).

    cr

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