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2015-07-03 -Short Attention Span Theater-
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Forget little green men -- aliens will look like humans, says Cambridge University evolution expert
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[INDEPENDENT.CO.UK] They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.
Entirely too humanoid.
From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.
I used to read lots of science fiction when I was a kid. Andre Norton, among others, even had humans interbreeding with humanoid aliens. Even as a twelve-year-old I thought the idea was ridiculous. Poul Anderson even had one of his heroes seduce one. I thought that was actually yucky--convergent pheromones would be pretty unlikely.
Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.
I doubt it. We've got three or more evolutionary strains just on earth: vertebrate, insects, and arachnidae. I don't know where octopi and squids fall in that set so maybe it's four or more. And centipedes. That would make five. And clams and oysters and barnacles. Aliens might look more like ants or spiders or bumblebees or (going back a little further) trilobites.
Most successful kingdom of all time, evolution and planet: bacteria.
Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.
Some perhaps, given the size of just our galaxy. But would bilateral symmetry be the rule or the exception? Assuming the aliens had heads at all what's forcing them to have only two eyes? Spiders have eight eyes. Insects have only two eyes but they're compound. Why would they have noses? Insects don't. Why not something like gill slits or blowholes? Or osmosis? Insects and spiders have different mouth equivalents. Would they use language? If so, why, since rubbing their palps together could convey all sorts of data? How many sexes? Bees have males, non-breeding "females," and queens. Would they have DNA? Or some other equivalent that brilliant Cambridge University scholars haven't thought up yet? I could keep going but my tentacles are getting tired from all this typing.
In his new book published on 2 July, The Runes of Evolution, the University of Cambridge academic builds on the principle of convergent evolution -- that different species will independently evolve similar features, with the comparison of the camera eye of an octopus and a human eye a favourite example -- and argues it will not just took place on Earth.
I'm kind of at a loss for the intelligence data in that last sentence--likely there's a word or two missing or the writer lost track of tense. The panda's thumb is another favorite example of convergent evolution but lobsters have no thumbs. They do have elbows, I suppose, though trilobites didn't. But it's probably more intellectually satisfying than speculation on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and just as likely of proof. 
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Posted by Fred 2015-07-03 00:00||
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