|
| |
|
The eminent Harvard biologist and philosopher of science,
Edward O. Wilson, noted for his creation of the field of sociobiology and for
his many books, has written a new book, The Meaning of Human Existence.
It should be of great interest to the readers and writers of science fiction.
The book attempts to explain how humanity has come to its present state of
existence because of the forces of natural selection as they act on individuals
and on groups. In particular, based on the lessons learned from the record of
evolution that lead from viruses and bacteria to vertebrates to human beings,
Wilson has attempted to produce a list of specifications of how some
hypothetical intelligent beings that might have evolved on an earth-like planet
of another star system would look and act.
SF writers usually base their intelligent aliens on the
assumption that the processes of evolution on an alien planet have produced some
intelligent life form that in the course of time, because of its intelligence,
proceeds to develop a complex technological civilization. Some of my favorite SF
writers have invented fascinating alien species that combine instinctual animal
behavior with high intelligence. Examples are Larry Niven's tiger-like
carnivorous Kzin, his sheep-like herbivorous Puppeteers, and Poul Anderson's
eagle-like territorial Ythrians. All became intelligent enough to form highly
developed technological civilizations, carrying their innate animal behaviors
with them to the stars.
However, Wilson would say that the SF writers have it
backwards: the random walk of evolutionary development and varying conditions of
environment generates a species that by chance develops a cooperative social
structure. Then, if the conditions are just right, the existence of that
cooperative social structure pushes the development of intelligence. He traces
the development of intelligence from the primarily vegetarian Australopithecines
(which had a 600 cc brain volume) to meat-eating Homo Habilis (680 cc brain
volume) to Homo Erectus (900 cc brain volume) to Homo Sapiens (1,400 cc brain
volume). Wilson suggests that the initial innovation in Homo Habilis of
including meat in their diet led to the establishment of semi-permanent camps in
which the young were protected and to which roving cooperative hunters brought
meat to feed the group. This led to villages with complex cooperative social
structures. These ultimately led to cities, civilization, and technology. At
each step along this path, increased intelligence provided group and individual
advantages, and so high intelligence emerged.
Wilson points out that such cooperative social structures are
very rare among the animal species. The 400 million years of evolution on Earth
has produced only 20 examples of species, with complex social structures, and
most of these are insects. All of these social species developed rather late in
the game, and all have been very successful. For example, among all of the
highly variable insect species, only two groups of socialized insects, ants and
termites, comprise about half of the total global insect biomass by weight,
which can be taken as a measure of their success.
In Chapter 10 of his book, Wilson uses the lessons learned in
analyzing the intellectual and social development of Homo Sapiens to predict the
characteristics of a hypothetical intelligent alien species that might develop
on an earth-like planet of another star system. In what follows I have condensed
and paraphrased Wilson's logic, but the arguments are basically his. We will
consider his predictions one at a time:
(1) Intelligent Aliens will be land-dwellers, not aquatic. The final
ascent to human intelligence required the use of fire as a portable high-energy
source in developing technology beyond the stone-age level. It is difficult to
imagine an ocean-dwelling species reaching iron-age technology.
(2) Intelligent Aliens will be relatively large animals. The most
intelligent land animals, in descending order, are Old World apes and monkeys,
elephants, pigs, and dogs, all at the high end of the animal size spectrum.
Small body size means smaller brains, on the average, less memory capacity, and
lower intelligence. The hypothetical aliens would probably have a body mass
around 10 to 100 kg, i.e., somewhere between a dog and a human.
(3) Intelligent Aliens will be biologically audio-visual. In terms of
sensory perception, humans, with their reliance on sound and sight in very
restricted frequency bands, represent a rather isolated group. Most of the
animal world depends much more directly on smell and on the use of specialized
body-generated pheremone chemicals for signaling and communication. However,
pheremones are unsuitable for rapid communication, and therefore represent a
road block on the path to high intelligence. The hypothetical aliens could use
facial expressions or sign language for communication. However,
"telepathy" is ruled out, unless a species developed the capability of
internally generating and detecting radio waves or electrical signals as
communication. While electric eels and catfish have some capabilities in this
direction, it has developed because they are adapted to murky environments in
which vision is not useful.
(4) Intelligent Aliens will have a large distinct head located up front.
All land animals have elongated, bilaterally symmetric bodies, with brains and
key sensory inputs located in a head adapted for quick scanning and action. The
hypothetical aliens should be similar.
(5) Intelligent Aliens will have light to moderate jaws and teeth.
Animals with heavy mandibles and massive grinding teeth are typically
vegetarians that eat coarse low-energy vegetation. Animals with fangs and horns
use them for defense against predators and for competition among males. The
hypothetical aliens should have progressed by cooperation and strategy rather
than brute strength and combat. Only a broad high-energy meat and vegetable diet
could sustain the relatively large populations needed for the later stages in
the development of intelligence. Hence, moderate jaws with no fangs or horns.
(6) Intelligent Aliens will have a very high social intelligence. All
social insects (wasps, bees, termites, ants) and the most intelligent mammals
live in groups whose members simultaneously compete and cooperate. Functioning
in such a fast-moving and complex social network requires a great deal of social
intelligence.
(7) Intelligent Aliens will have a small number of free locomotory
appendages, levered for maximum strength with stiff internal or external
skeletons composed of hinged segments (as by human elbows and knees), and with
at least one pair that are terminated by digits with pulpy tips used for
sensitive touch and grasping. The four-legged-ness of land vertebrates is
perhaps because fishes with four lobe-fins (instead of six) colonized the land.
Insects have six locomotory appendages, and spiders have eight. Evidently a
relatively small number of such appendages is good for evolutionary success on
land. Only chimps and human invent tool artifacts, presumably because of the
utility of fingers with soft sensitive tips. A technological civilization that
depended on beaks, talons, scrapers, or claws for tool manipulation is difficult
to imagine.
(8) Intelligent Aliens will be moral. The cooperation apparent in all of
the highly social species of the Earth is based on some degree of altruism and
self sacrifice. It has arisen from natural selection at both the individual and
the group levels and has led to our sense of morality. Presumably alien
intelligences derived from similar group evolution would inherit a similar sense
of morality.
(9) Intelligent Aliens skilled in genetic engineering will not have used
genetic modification to significantly change their social nature. Our
technological civilization has only very recently reached the beginnings of an
ability to modify and manipulate the human genetic code. It is not difficult to
imagine a future in which we take the human genome in hand and change it to
eliminate genetic diseases and disease tendencies, to give us better memories,
more intelligence, bodies better adapted to hostile environments, and more
longevity. Perhaps we might even decide to take this process a step further and
edit out the inherited "baggage" of instinctual behavior that we call
"human nature". Wilson believes that we will not do this, and instead
will choose to retain the inherently messy, self-contradictory, internally
conflicted, endlessly creative human mind that exists today, and that similarly
intelligent aliens will do the same. We and they will be existential
conservatives.
Another aspect of Wilson's book that should be of interest to SF readers is
his assessment of the prospects for interstellar colonization. Wilson has
serious reservations about the colonization by humans of the planets of other
star systems. These reservations are similar to those expressed in Paul Davies'
Afterword in the recent book Starship Century (in which I wrote a
chapter on interstellar wormholes).
Basically, any planetary ecology is a vast array of
interacting virus, bacterial, plant, and animal life that, after many eons of
natural selection and responses to random events, challenges, and catastrophes,
has arrived at a stable system. The ecology of an alien world would necessarily
be qualitatively different from that of Earth and would be wholly incompatible
with our own ecology. The two worlds would necessarily have radically different
origins, different molecular machinery, and would differ in fundamental ways,
due to the endless paths of evolution that produced the inhabiting life forms.
The typical grocery store contains only a tiny subset of the
Earth's plant and animal material, a subset carefully selected to be edible and
non-toxic. The vast majority of terrestrial organisms are unsuitable for human
consumption. The organisms of alien planets would be much more so. Wilson argues
that the problem of transplanting the Earth's ecosystem to another planet
basically has no solution, that we must resign ourselves to living on the one
planet we currently occupy, and that we should take better care of it if we wish
to continue doing so.
These discussions of intelligent aliens and interstellar
colonization, while perhaps of most interest to SF readers, represent only a
small fraction of Wilson's book. He displays his expertise in the study of
social insects with fascinating details on the behavior of driver ants,
leaf-cutter ants, termites, and bees. He addresses the "two culture"
problem, the disconnect between the sciences and the humanities, by announcing
and promoting the dawn of a New Enlightenment in which the new insights into
provided by science on the origins and outlines of human nature can shape and
encourage a new flowering of art, literature, and philosophy. He also takes on
religion, describing it as an essentially destructive syndrome that exploits the
tribal us-vs-them tendencies of human nature, promotes unreason, and ultimately
causes good people to do bad things.
Overall, The Meaning of Human Existence is an
important contribution to our understanding of humanity and of our place on the
Earth and in the universe. It is disturbing, thought provoking, fascinating, and
highly recommended.
John G. Cramer's 2016 nonfiction book (Amazon gives it 5 stars) describing his transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, The Quantum Handshake - Entanglement, Nonlocality, and Transactions, (Springer, January-2016) is available online as a hardcover or eBook at: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319246406 or https://www.amazon.com/dp/3319246402.
SF Novels by John Cramer: Printed editions of John's hard SF novels Twistor and Einstein's Bridge are available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Twistor-John-Cramer/dp/048680450X and https://www.amazon.com/EINSTEINS-BRIDGE-H-John-Cramer/dp/0380975106. His new novel, Fermi's Question may be coming soon.
Alternate View Columns Online: Electronic reprints of 212 or more "The Alternate View" columns by John G. Cramer published in Analog between 1984 and the present are currently available online at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av .
References:
