Thank you, Dave, for making me look up "van der waals forces" in order to understand today's comic. I have great respect for artists who send me to the dictionary/Google for the right word rather than dumb everything down.
That's what's great about this comic: I get the mental exercise from the world-building and all the little details and the visual appeal of some consistently striking artwork. It's a great balance.
(Intellectualism aside, I really love the reaction of the Fillipod in the last panel. I mean, how else are you supposed to react to that situation?)
I know! That fillipod is so cute :)
Problem with the evolutionary explanation, though. If they needed Van der Waals to climb the tree, and they needed to climb the tree to eat... then evolution doesn't work, because they would never have survived long enough to evolve. It would have had to evolve fully within a single generation because having anything less than perfect Van der Waals strong enough to fully support their weight would not get them the food.
What would work better is if they used to be tiny, which required less Van der Waals to climb, and then evolved bigger and bigger in order to compete with other animals in the environment. Thus the Van der Waals got stronger gradually in order to support their real evolution, which was size.
Alternatively, the TREES might have used to be a lot shorter and less smooth. Then the trees who were harder to climb would reproduce more because less of their fruit was eaten, causing them to get taller and smoother over time. The fillipods would have then been forced to evolve stronger Van der Waals in order to continue to eat a more and more difficult-to-reach food source.
