explain xkcd:Museum
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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
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This is incomplete: This page was created by an arthropod who will get 10 pointy things to zap a metal box and tell it stuff.. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
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, and would generally require a more advanced understanding of what can be achieved. While many species select for fitness during reproduction, this is normally for traits that are already present, or of novel features that arise randomly and stand out as an advantage against their peers. Only humans are known to pursue major change, and mostly in other domesticated species, and even then it is an imperfect process that can be very hit-and-miss.
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
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This is one of 39 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [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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Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
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