3127: Where Babies Come From

Where Babies Come From

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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.

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Explanation

Children are often curious, and ask a lot of questions about the world around them. "Where do babies come from?" is one such question that tends to come up at some point, and is 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, and expressed in the vocabulary of the specialist's field. Some of them are allusions to the process of conception or childbirth; others are simply incorrect.

The experts might be deliberately misleading the questioner by using very euphemistic terms that would likely not be understood by a child to avoid personal embarrassment, deliberately over-'simplifying' the explanation as a stepping stone to the eventual more specific truth, or else themselves be 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 a less obtuse reframing of the topic much closer to that of actual reproductive biology. "How is babby formed?" was a notorious meme from the early 2000s.

Geneticist

An admixture event refers to new genes being introduced into a population (for example, intermarriage adding genes for blue eyes into a population that previously lacked them). These gene movements are typically measurable on the order of thousand year or more timescales, and therefore are commonly dated to thousands or even millions of years ago. KYA = "one thousand years ago" and 0.001 KYA = 1 year, approximately the duration of most human pregnancies. The comic uses this term to describe the gene mixing of two people having a child. The joke is in the use of such large scale terms to describe the creation of one child, and how the technical language being used hides the answer, especially from a child.

Astronomer

Ejections of matter from parent bodies are common astronomical events, 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.

Alternatively, the "low-impulse ejection" could refer to ejaculation, not the act of giving birth. Since impulse is defined as change in momentum, and momentum is mass times velocity, birth would technically be a higher-impulse event than ejaculation, due to the relative mass of a baby and of an ejaculate, but it's still very low on a cosmic scale and would still qualify as "low-impulse".

Software Engineer

An off-by-one error (aside from being a difficult theme to build a party around) is a common programming mistake where a value ends up off by one. This is most frequently the result of confusion about whether lists of items are indexed starting at position 'zero' or with the first of them at the more language-like position 'one'. A birth could also be described as a "population" metric suddenly increasing by one; or, alternatively, a baby could cause a previously accurate static population metric to become off-by-one from the new correct total. This could also be referring to an unplanned pregnancy, which would lead the local population to be one higher than the parent(s) may have calculated.

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. (The Wikipedia article on Calvin’s dad mentions that he gave explanations about babies involving purchases at Sears and Kmart.) The suggestion that everything is removed except for the desired result is fairly often used to describe how sculptors work, and similar craftspeople such as woodcarvers.

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, although the moisture alluded to here is likely that of bodily fluids and the turbulence being more about a tangible physicality between people. It is a pungent metaphor for coitus.

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 to substantiate the babies' provenance. The plaint is a common preamble and disclaimer in formal history publications. Rather than answer the question in the general, they appear to be trying to answer it for each individual baby by questioning those thought to be responsible. 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

[Hairy, Ponytail, Hairbun, Cueball and Megan are standing below a question given at the top of the comic. Each of the five gives their answer to the question. Below each character is a label with their respective occupation.]

Various experts answer the question “Where do babies come from?”

Geneticist

[Hairy, the geneticist, has one arm up, and is facing right.]

Hairy: Recent admixture event, roughly 0.001 Kya.

Astronomer

[Ponytail, the astronomer, is standing normally and facing left.]

Ponytail: Low-impulse ejection from a parent body.

Software engineer

[Hairbun, the software engineer, is standing with one forearm pointed up, and is facing right.]

Hairbun: Off-by-one error in the population calculations.

Geologist

[Cueball, the geologist, is standing with one forearm half up, and is facing left.]

Cueball: The area was originally a uniform plane, but the non-baby parts eroded at higher rates.

Meteorologist

[Megan, the meteorologist, is standing normally and facing right.]

Megan: Moist ground-level turbulent mixing.

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Discussion

First, I guess. B for brain (talk) (youtube channel wobsite (supposed to be a blag)) 21:41, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

The geology one seems to be more just an inference that a baby would emerge through differential erosion/weathering from the parent rock body. The meteorological one is both a near actual weather related event description and also a pun on what happens during conception. Other entries also vary between being puns on conception or birth (technically kind of true) or just wrong inferences using their field (such as the “off by one”) 2A09:BAC2:39EE:240A:0:0:397:5A 22:09, 11 August 2025 (UTC)pakers

Yea I think the geology one reminds me of the reverse footsteps after snow (when you step in snow it compresses it which reduces melting compared to soft, noncompressed snow, meaning once the snow has melted the footsteps are now elevated) TheTrainsKid (talk) 22:18, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

0.001 kya (kilo years ago) is 0.001 x a thousand years ago (i.e. around a year ago) 82.42.161.198 22:36, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

.001kya is a one digit approximation for 9 months (technically .00075kya) MAP (talk) 01:59, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

Actually, an approximation with precision of 1 year (= 1 a = 0.001 ka). A 5× more precise one-significant-figure approximation is 0.0008 kya (technically within actual variation, but further from the average than 0.00075). 2001:4C4D:12CE:DA00:11BB:2E59:DD89:1F6A 05:59, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

Why did Randall make this comic? My theory: he's gonna be a father soon and he's trying to figure out how to break the news to us. Caliban (talk) 15:25, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

This seems unlikely. Unless they're adopting ...? 205.175.118.102 16:57, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

She had breast cancer. You feed babies with breasts you do not give birth to them using them, and can feed babies in other ways... So there is no problem getting kids after being treated for breast cancer. The question is if you wish to, given the risk of recurrence and early death. But Randall has made lots of comics about babies so this comic is no different than those other, that did not indicate Randall about to have one. --Kynde (talk) 06:21, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I think the article could be a bit more clinical and direct. Right now, it's low on information, and high on vauge implication, aiming for wit. I'll take a crack at improving some sections, but I'm not sure what the intentions were for every part. 62.92.112.171 18:39, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

Saying "contemporaneous documentation" suggests to me that the historians are seeking photographic or video evidence of the, erm, precipitating events. 72.204.242.221 19:48, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

I guess somebody didn't get the deeper sense of humour. 82.13.184.33 08:22, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I understand the historian as questioning a (recently born) baby. After asking for more documentation the baby starts to cry which is interpreted as uncooperativeness. --2001:638:807:507:25AF:D335:DFE6:ACF4 08:32, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Astronomer: at a Coldplay concert? 2401:d002:a203:dc00:801b:7795:5d8a:c0a (talk) 09:32, 14 August 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Great! --85.159.196.156 09:22, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

GoComics now requires paid subscriptions, so the link to the Calvin and Hobbes comic should probably be changed to an image that doesn't have this restriction. 2001:8003:1DC8:7900:ACDF:2A0D:1D9F:87F5 03:15, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't have a subscription to GoComics, and the link works for me... on my desktop machine, at any rate. But not on my phone. I don't know where the difference lies. Perhaps the versions of Firefox and Chrome that Windows 8.1 supports aren't advanced enough to play with GoComics's demands. BunsenH (talk) 23:30, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

What if we linked to this? https://web.archive.org/web/20241128040214/https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/04/18

--85.159.196.156 09:22, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that works. I've made that change. BunsenH (talk) 14:43, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

"Built from a kit" is incorrect currently, but may be correct in future - if genetics and cloning techniques get more advanced, so people can configure DNA and RNA of their child as whatever they want. In most absurd cases, it could result in "future where everyone reproduce via cloning and genetic engineering, having multiple human sub-species optimized for different tasks - since due to genetic defects, reproductive organs of population became non-functional or non-existent, unusable for reproduction purposes - which doesn't stop our descendants from being massive perverts". --SMGmsgsgd (talk) 20:28, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

The most common source for off-by-one errors isn't the beginning of the list, but the end. When counting to a number, you can count until your counter is that number or until it is larger than the target. You can also process an element before or after checking your counter. This alone gives you 4 ways of counting, five of which are off-by-one. 91.89.57.45 17:41, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Leaving out the biologist answer, which is of course [BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP] 64.106.111.98 (talk) 21:43, 22 October 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
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