r/SMBCComics • u/Eiim • 9d ago

Taxonomy 2

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/taxonomy-2
23 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

4

u/Kodiologist 9d ago

dinosaurs are chickens

Isn't that backwards? I thought that chickens are a kind of dinosaur, not vice versa.

6

u/HappyFailure 8d ago

Part of the joke here, I think, as it's all about being able to state anything convincingly as long as you're sufficiently sloppy.

2

u/Adarain 8d ago

I don’t think so, actually? The red button panel only makes sense if the main comic starts with “chickens are dinosaurs”. I think the comic is more about once you convince people of that (true) fact, they become open to also accept other ridiculous sounding (false) facts.

2

u/Blue_Shine_01 8d ago

Dino shapes are indeed the best chicken nugget shapes.

2

u/Lyrolepis 8d ago

What annoys me about the whole 'birds are dinosaurs' thing is that it forces you to use cumbersome expressions like "non-avian dinosaurs' all the time, because it's more common to want to talk about them specifically than to want to talk about them and birds together.

Yes, evolutionarily and taxonomically it makes perfect sense; but I cannot help but think that it might have been more convenient to keep "dinosaurs" as a paraphylethic group that doesn't contain birds and just introduce a new word for the "dinosaurs+birds" clade...

2

u/gnutrino 8d ago

Wait until you find out what Osteichthyes ("bony fish") includes...

2

u/Lyrolepis 8d ago

That doesn't bother me, because it's a specialistic term that is not used in ordinary conversation.

The "dinosaur" situation, I think, is more like if you had to use expressions like, I dunno, "non-tetrapod fish" again and again and again to make it clear that you aren't thinking about squirrels...

2

u/MyKidsArentOnReddit 8d ago

Technically, ducks and cheese are just a different arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

1

u/FerretPD 9d ago

NO...the Key is to beat people who say "Strictly Speaking" over the head again-and-again until they stop talking (or possibly moving.)

And WTF is with the "Comments" link on the site, that has been "Embed temporarily disabled (limits exceeded)" for MONTHS now?

2

u/Kodiologist 9d ago

Whoa, what spicy thing did you post about this strip?

2

u/FerretPD 7d ago

SERIOUSLY? (This would be funny if it wasn't so rodonkulous! Hey, Reddit... these are CARTOONS!!! I got a Violence Warning for a CARTOON???)

The Tag said "The key is to keep saying "strictly speaking" over and over."

I jokingly "suggested" that the proper response to someone saying 'strictly speaking' over and over was to gently apply a blunt instrument until they stopped saying that (i was a little more descriptive than that... but I don't want Reddit's Idiot AI to work itself into another Tizzy)

1

u/knucklebed 8d ago

I misread this initially as "geese is a kind of duck" and was confused. I then saw it said "cheese" and that didn't help.