Mully:  Skulder, these tropical Earth plants look suspicious to me.  Why would plants evolve to make hallucinogens like coca or L-dopa in their leaves? 

Skulder:  Those "plants" must be alien invaders in disguise.  The aliens will drug us into slavery, to help them take over Earth.

Mully:  Everything can't be alien invaders, Skulder.  But why don't the plants just make poisons to kill predators that eat the leaves?

Skulder:  Mind slaves are more useful than corpses.  That Bio Sci-Fi professor--my sixth sense says she's one of them . . . .

Skulder:  Mully--what the heck is going on in the "human genome"?  The point of sequencing the human genome was to show how genetically unique humans are, and to use our genes to make humans live longer and happier.  But now the scientists are saying our "genome" makes us look the same as a worm!

Mully: Well, not quite the same.  Just 30% of our genes are shared by worms.

Skulder:  So a third of us are worms.  I thought as much.

Mully: Actually, all human genomes are 99.99% the same.  And human DNA is 98% the same as a chimpanzee.  And 80% the same as a mouse.

Skulder: So genes don't make us human after all?  Then what does--alien invaders?  No, wait--that makes us all aliens in disguise!

Mully: I don't know, but it will take more than The Cartoon Guide to figure out this one.

Mully: Skulder, what are all these plants and animals doing in the desert, where it's dry as a mummy and hot enough to fry an egg?  I see a shrub on the side of that sand dune, and a desert squirrel just hopped by.  And what does that vulture feed on?

Skulder: You don't want to hear that the desert squirrel is really a Betelgean in disguise, evolved on a much hotter planet.  But if you think about it, any creature that evolved in this desert would feel like an alien if it tried to live in the "normal" muddy climate of Gambier.

Mully: If you think Gambier's bad, try Vancouver.  But there are basic physical limits.  If life needs liquid water, it simply can't live in heat that boils the water away.

Skulder:  That's what the Betelgeans are counting on: Since neutrinos failed, their next hope is the greenhouse effect, to make a desert of Gambier and put a stop to humans learning about the universe.  But look how these cacti hold tons of water; it must come from somewhere.  Water finds a secret passage  . . . .

Mully: Natural selection makes animals produce offspring to propagate their own genes.  So why do many humans avoid having children?  In the Middle Ages, one in ten Europeans were monks or nuns.  Today we’d rather make money, or play video games—instead of having children.  Why don’t such tendencies die out?

Skulder: Not only that, we support other people’s children through the welfare state.  It shows how human culture has overtaken evolution.

Mully: But Skulder, other animals do the same.  Birds and mammals often help others raise offspring, instead of raising their own.  This completely goes against the lemming model.  How could this altruistic behavior have evolved?

Skulder:  I’ve always said, there must be an alien hand guiding evolution.  Even Vonnegut thinks so—what about that “blue tunnel of the afterlife”?

Mully:  A tortoise is gone, from the pen behind a house on Ward Street.  Why would the tortoise escape?  It gets food all day in the pen, and has three mates to breed.  Outside, it'll just get run over by an SUV.  And don't tell me it's trying to reach Galapagos.

Skulder:  Mully, that's not a tortoise.  It's a Betelgean investigator, reporting to the mother ship on the activities of that Bio Sci-Fi prof next door.

Mully:  I don't know about that.  But tortoises didn't evolve in pens.  And they don't have big brains to understand evolution.

Skulder:  Just wait till they the Betelgeans out what these Kenyon humanoids are really up to.

Mully:  Skulder, our local galaxy's got a problem.  If our solar system formed out of the sun, which fuses hydrogen into helium, where did all the carbon and heavy elements come from to make the planets--and us?

Skulder:  You're right, Mully.  Our sun's too young to make carbon, let alone iron.  Our earth must have formed from the dust of an ancient alien civilization.

Mully:  I don't know.  There must be an answer less . . . spooky.

Skulder:  Trust no one, especially scientists.  The truth is out there.