Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for September 17, 2012

Hobbes loves looking at the fourth wall.

No tail! That’s impossible!

I see Hobbes point.

And then there are all the females who think that they should have had a tail and get a “Tail Removal Scar” tattooed on.

Thereby hangs a tale…no tail.

So, are we gonna go back to being four-legged and have a tail?No tail on Calvin. No pants on Hobbes.

Aaah – the sting is in the tail…

have a big Hole ha ha haaa

Tail is on the flip side you dope.

Don’t worry Calvin, there isn’t no room in your jeans for a tail. Haha

HA!! I want your desk next to my desk at the office – just so they’d have to break us up and make us sit elsewhere.

I think his big mouth more than makes up for the lack of a tail, Hobbes.

One more appendage would just get him into that much more trouble.

If we had to choose an animal’s tail to be permanently attached to us, which one would you choose?

No claws either.

Evolution:no dice

Ooooooh! Hobbes, Bad Boy!

xxx

“I am the culmination of creation.”Ali thought he was the ‘crown’ of creation. He said, “I am the King of the World.”

My mom would tell you exactly what your butt needed!!!

Hobbes is right,just think how handy a tail would be to hold on to tools your going to use,little kids while your on the phone.Thats just 2things.But I can see a great future for a well trained tail.Calvin would love it for snow ball fights.

The enhancements are in the eye of the beholder of the pants…

The tail of a young boy.

Listening to the “Airplane” on the way to work this morning ’Crown of Creation". Very ironic that this toon showed up today too. “Life is change, how it differs from a rock”.

@Nabuquduriuzhur

1. Citation please. Author and title.

2. There’s no such thing as “devolving.” Natural selection doesn’t care if, for example we swim, slither, crawl, walk on four legs, walk on two legs with our knuckles scraping the ground, or walk on two legs with arms too short to touch the ground. Natural selection cares whether the way we get around enables us to survive and reproduce in our current environment. Going from two-leg walking back to swimming isn’t “devolving.” It’s just “evolving.”

3. The only known beneficial “genetic error” is sickle cell? Snort. In the recessive condition, SC protects against malaria, just like you said. But in the recessive condition, Tay-Sachs may help protect against TB (that one’s still not decided yet though). And in the recessive condition, cystic fibrosis is protective against cholera, typhoid fever, and possibly asthma. In the dominant condition, these conditions are disabling, quickly and horribly fatal, and disabling and life-shortening, respectively. There is also a “genetic error” in the gene that produces CCR5, a protein receptor on the surface of white blood cells. People homozygous for this “error” seem to have a greater susceptibility to West Nile Virus, but they are completely immune to many strains of HIV.

4. And about those “genetic errors.” (By which I assume you mean DNA transcription errors that happen during the formation of the reproductive cells and thence are passed to the next generation – the ONLY kind of errors that have any relevance whatsoever to evolution.) Well, “genetic errors” of all sorts happen all the time. Some are harmful. Most have no effect. A few are beneficial to continued survival, or greater reproduction, or both. An individual with a beneficial “error” will tend to leave more offspring, and if the “error” is transmissible to the next generation, some or all of the offspring will also have the “error.” If this cycle continues through the generations, eventually the beneficial “error” will become more prevalent in the population. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Evolution by Natural Selection. Give ‘er a round of applause.

5. Perhaps your point was that we’re all “devolving” into sicker, more pathetic versions of ourselves, and eventually at some point it might even get so bad that some future generation will dissolve into a puddle of inert goo because, darn it, our genes got too riddled with errors. If that’s ever happened in 3.5-ish billion years of evolution on this planet, I’d love to hear about it. Generally, extinction happens because environmental factors change, and the mechanisms of natural selection don’t have time to produce new forms or behaviors that can survive in the new environment. They certainly die trying though. Extinction does not happen because one’s own genome implodes from within and self-destructs the species. If humans became the first, it’d certainly be an interesting process to observe.

6. Try the Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on evolution. I’m not being sarcastic. It’s a pretty good introduction to the subject.

@Everyone else – pardon my rambling.

tl;dr:

Nabs, evolution doesn’t happen that way. I highly doubt a reputable scientist would write a book like the one you describe. Either the scientist wasn’t a good one, or you completely misinterpreted what he wrote.

@Nabuquduriuzhur: One person’s mutation is another’s evolution =)

Dr. Sheldon Cooper, thy middle name is Calvin.

I see a wedgie coming.

“The fool has said in his heart; there is no God.”

haha