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| Where Babies Come From |
 Title text: Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record. |
Explanation
Children are often curious, and ask a lot of questions about the world around them. One such question that tends to come up at some point is "where do babies come from?" and it's notable as one that many adults are uncomfortable giving correct answers to, because of the common reluctance to discuss sex-related matters with youngsters. While children are sometimes told that there's a baby inside a pregnant woman's tummy, the issues of how the baby got in there, or how it's supposed to get out, are often dodged. There are a variety of common myths about where babies come from, as told to children, such as "brought by a stork", "found in a cabbage patch", or "built from a kit". This comic presents a variety of answers to that question, supposedly from the point of view of specialists in several different areas of science, some of which are incorrect, others of which are allusions to the process of conception or childbirth expressed in the vocabulary of the specialist's field.
They might be deliberately misleading the questioner by using very euphemistic terms to avoid personal embarrassment, deliberately over-'simplifying' the explanation as a stepping stone to the eventual more specific truth or else they are themselves ignorant/misled about the process. In each case, however, their abstraction of the process is described in terms that are actually relatively technical ones from their own field, to the presumed audience, showing that they are not necessarily able to find the right level of explanation, as well as not having used the a less obtuse reframing of the topic much closer to that of actual reproductive biology.
- Geneticist
- Terms normally used to describe gene flow among populations (for example, the acquisition through intermarriage of genes for blue eyes in a population that previously lacked them) are applied to the fertilization of a human egg, a very specific "admixture event" (zygote formation). Population-level admixtures are commonly dated to thousands or even millions of years ago; KYA = "one thousand years ago". 0.001 KYA = 1 year, approximately the duration of most human pregnancies. Fellow geneticists would likely commend their colleague's wit. Children, and most everyone else, would likely just go "Huh?"
- Astronomer
- Ejections of matter from parent bodies are common events in the galaxy and the observable universe, at scales ranging from comets to black holes. The process of giving birth is compared to a "low-impulse" ejection, such as the casting off of rocks and dust from a rotating asteroid. Such a comparison, while it may make sense in cosmology, is unlikely to find favor with any woman who is, or has ever been, in labor.
- Alternately the "low-impulse ejection" could refer to ejaculation, not the act of giving birth. The former would have a considerably higher impulse than the latter but it's still very low on a cosmic scale and would still qualify as "low-impulse".
- Software Engineer
- An off-by-one error is a common programming mistake in which a value is, well, off by one. A birth could be described as a "population" metric increasing by one, or alternately, a baby could cause a static population metric to become off-by-one.
- Geologist
- The baby is said to have been created by the process of differential erosion, in which softer rocks are eroded more quickly, leaving harder rocks behind. Arguably, a geologist who was making a serious attempt to compare geological and biological processes would recognize that the growth of a fetus has much more in common with accretionary, rather than erosional, mechanisms. Granting that the geologist depicted is witty and not clueless, this explanation is the most intentionally farcical, the most Calvin's Dad, of the five.
- Meteorologist
- Turbulent mixing of air masses ("turbulence") has been experienced by just about everyone who has ever been in an airborne aircraft. Turbulence can occur at all levels of the atmosphere from the ground up, and is frequently accompanied by clouds and precipitation. It is a pungent metaphor for coitus. Fasten your seat belts.
- Historians (title text)
- Instead of proffering an explanation for "where babies come from", the historians (plural) lodge a complaint about the difficulties they have encountered in obtaining the data needed for them to make one. The plaint is a common preamble and disclaimer in formal history publications. The historians express surprise and indignation that their efforts to obtain "better documentation" of the "initial events" (the mating behavior) leading to baby formation are seen as prurient and voyeuristic, and are met with resistance.
Transcript
- Various experts answer the question “Where do babies come from?”
- [Five characters are shown, left to right, each saying their answer. Below each character is their respective occupation.]
- Hairy [Geneticist]: Recent admixture event, roughly 0.001 Kya.
- Ponytail [Astronomer]: Low-impulse ejection from a parent body.
- Hairbun [Software engineer]: Off-by-one error in the population calculations.
- Cueball [Geologist]: The area was originally a uniform plane, but the non-baby parts eroded at higher rates.
- Megan [Meteorologist]: Moist ground-level turbulent mixing.
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