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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[edit]

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. 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[edit]

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[edit]

"Business" is misspelled in the title text as "busines".

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Make changes, try things out, or just have fun with the wiki here! Just leave everything above the line alone, please.

This is a test. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]} 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

^furhhfghure _{guyrburgryhuyvfr} "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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yum yum ^{[citation needed]}

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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