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| Early Arthropods |
 Title text: 'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects |
Explanation
This comic points out that something we generally take for granted — spiders spinning webs — can seem weird and disgusting when we consider the details of what it involves. Whereas the kind of adaptation referred to by the first arthropod (seen in isopods) and by the second (scorpions or crabs) may seem like obvious things for evolution to arrive at, it may be less clear how something would arrive at the outcome of web construction.
Note that evolution in real life does not work the way the comic implies, as creatures cannot choose a direction in which to evolve.[citation needed] An individual organism can choose to pursue certain activities, but these only affect its number of offspring. An intelligent species could accelerate this gradual process of natural selection through artificial selection that favored certain individuals, but this would still require many generations to make observable progress. While many species select for fitness during reproduction, this is normally for traits that are already present. Only humans are known to pursue major change, and mostly in other domesticated species.
Spiders are a recurring theme on xkcd.
Crabs are a recurring theme in biology. (and conversations with Randall)
The eusocial insects mentioned in the title text are another group of arthropods with high levels of social organisation. As such, they are notable for not "minding their own busines (sic)", as their ancestor arthropod apparently expects. Eusociality has evolved multiple times in the Hymenoptera alone, as well as in termites. There is no arthropod species that is the ancestor to all the eusocial arthropods and no others. While there are a number of species of social spider, there aren't any that meet the strict definition of eusociality. Eusocial insects have been known to do weird things, such as giving birth to a separate species.
Transcript
- [Wide panel with three small arthropods standing on the ocean floor. Two of the creatures are facing the leftmost one. Small bubbles and particles float around them.]
- Arthropod 1: Now that we're multicellular, what are your plans?
- Arthropod 1: I'm gonna evolve little legs and swim around with them!
- Arthropod 2: I'm gonna evolve sharp pincers and use them to crunch stuff!
- Arthropod 3: I'm gonna evolve glands to make string from my butt and use it to construct elaborate geometric nets hundreds of times my size to catch other animals.
- [Beat panel narrowed in on the arthropods.]
- [Same scene:]
- Arthropod 1: Dude.
- Arthropod 2: Can you please just be normal about this?
- Arthropod 3: What??!
Trivia
"Business" is misspelled in the title text as "busines".
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