G. ARE HUMANOID EXTRATERRESTRIALS IMPLAUSIBLE?

Once upon a time your author was sitting in a conference where the subject of UFOs and ETs et al was being discussed. The speaker at the moment was a veteran UFO student who has, over his intellectual career, wavered wildly about the ETH. He was then in his most aggressive anti-ETH stage.

The talk was entirely about arguments for the conclusion that the ETH could not possibly be true, and verged upon nonsense. There were five distinct arguments given. Some of them touched upon subjects already discussed in this essay, but two of them were presented as if they were so self-evident that they ended the debate by themselves.

I listened to the unraveling presentation with a great deal of interest. About half of that interest was in the responses of two audience members seated two rows in front of me. They were respected Old School astronomers, PhDs at a prestigious university. They were also more open-minded to new ideas than most of their tribe. As statements built from the speaker, these two gentlemen (both of whom I liked by the way) would suddenly glance at one another, nod and say "That's Right!" The speaker had won the day.

But had he really?

This was and is a very intelligent man. But, he is trained in statistics and astronomy and is not a biologist. He obviously understood classical Old School evolutionary theory, but not a few vital aspects of what needed to be brought to bear. In this he is entirely without blame. Many of the so-called "giants" of evolutionary theory were preaching the same erroneous opinions.

In this section the concept of whether environments would be expected to develop humanoid forms will be addressed. In the next the issue will be the compatibility of atmospheres on technically advanced ET home planets.

CONVERGENT EVOLUTION AND SUCCESSFUL FORMS

When modern biologists go to war in Kansas in defense of Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection being taught in science classrooms without Biblical theology alongside, they fight an old fear that they have that God will somehow "invade" their science. When some of them fight against humanoids in Outer Space, they are in some very odd way fighting the same war.

They are correct in Kansas but wrong in Outer space.

What these biologists fear is "design", because design means a Designer. This fear has caused them to lose touch with the entire statement of Darwin's Theory, and speak as if they were non-scientist amateurs, presenting as much emotion as science.

What are they forgetting?

The theory says that forms will occasionally get mutations and those mutations will not be deliberately aimed at any result, but will be in that sense "random." Because "random" is essentially the opposite of "designed", this pleases the fearful and they stop there 9or at least not go on talking as much.) Stopping there misses half of the theory and almost surely the far more interesting (and scientific) half.

What comes next is the "selection" part. These mutations face a real physical/biological/chemical environment, not some random dice game. There are LAWS in that environment --- "scientific" laws, forceful geometry, life-and-death pre-existing conditions. Those circumstances will over time and trials "select" survivors (successful forms) or losers. What the fearful paranoids have therefore deprived themselves of is to explore the powerful effects that these forces will have on what forms finally arise.

Fortunately there are some biologists not "religiously restricted" by these fears. They are called the convergent evolutionists and they, in my opinion, are the ones doing all the really worthwhile work.

The best way to ease oneself into the mindset of this branch of research is to take an example which is so striking and "physical" that it just must be.

Take a large swimming creature: that beast must face a very powerful fact of life. If it wants to go really fast, it better be the correct shape to do so.

Going really fast if you are a big water beast can be the key to survival if you are an open seas predator, and this is the kicker: it doesn't make a difference whether you evolved from a "fish", a "reptile", or a "mammal." Your history of change resembles those others who made a living just like you.

And, although it may be harder to put all the facts together in some of the other convergent cases, this one is simple. There is a purely mathematical or geometric shape which governs how easily you'll slip through the water. That math rules whether you are mammal, fish, or reptile. YOU MUST OBEY THE LAW.

Any random mutation which takes your shape away from the ideal geometry is a survival loser. Any random mutation which takes your shape towards it is a potential winner. So up to a point, all fast-swimming open-ocean predators look alike, no matter how differently their ancestors appeared.

Convergent evolutionists have been observing often mind-boggling structural similarities for about a century, never quite getting their Randomness colleagues to focus properly. (The first dawning of this for me as a kid was all the widely separated "big birds who couldn't fly" on every continent, which, I was told, were not really related to one another. "But they look the same! How can that be?"

You could not contain in any reasonably sized essay a listing of all the convergences this science has now discovered. They are not just macro-structures, but micro-structures, and even mathematical patterns relating things like body sizes to heart rates, and beyond to lifespans. The avalanche of discovery is so great that the discussion of Natural Selection has finally seriously tilted towards the environmental factors which really "choose."

But ... how "forced" would be "humanoid form?" There have been several illustrious godfathers of Darwinism from the Citadel of Academia who have said: Not at all (and often in rather crude terms.)

George Gaylord Simpson (Harvard palaeontologist and evolutionist, at right below) led the charge against teaching Biblical Creationism in the classroom and this ferocious antipathy to any concession to design ideas spilled over into the over-emphasis about randomness that we have been lamenting. The spill-over resulted in comments about the human form being so accidental that it was unreasonable to imagine any very similar happening again elsewhere, or, for that matter, here on Earth should humanity go extinct.

William W. Howells (Harvard Anthropologist and Social Darwinist/Evolutionist, at left above) was a (sad in my opinion) example of a brilliant member of the tribe who was so assured by tribal doctrine that he was happy to go far outside his own field and make the following remark on what to expect if we bump into big extraterrestrials somewhere along the timeline:

"Look for plenty of fingers on the ends of two arms. I will lay a small bet that the first men from outer space will be neither bipeds nor quadrupeds, but bimanous quadrupedal hexapods. If they have four feet to hold them up, then they might well be as big as a horse or larger."

This is such amateurish shallow "logic" that it is embarrassing. And this fellow was really bright, and justifiably honored for his anthropology. Just being elevated in the Tribe seems to make one think that ones "random" opinions are worth stating as if they were worth hearing. But comments like Howells, repeated over and over by other tribal members and worshipful media, make a difference in the intellectual atmosphere and do damage. Even if one had a love-affair with centaurs, one should remind Howells that he does human progress no favors with such happy "authoritative" BS. Simpson, due to who he was and his intensity, exhibited none of the qualities of the true scientist either when it came to these matters.

The last vocal champion of almost-total randomness needed to be brought up here will be Stephen Jay Gould, the modern day media darling (until passing away a few years ago) who led Evolution's fights in Kansas and commented here and there on outer space. Gould; Harvard palaeontologist and evolutionist --- are we seeing a pattern here?

Gould had worked on a spectacular fossil deposit called The Burgess Shale. These fossils were spectacular in both their extreme age (as bigger beasts go) and their weird forms. Gould was impressed at this weirdness, as have almost all of us. That weirdness also seemed to fit the canonical doctrine of random forms.

Gould used the Burgess Shale to attack theories of design, and concepts of expected forms of all types. He was no fool and couched his language well. But, in the end, his message was clear: if you rewind the film of Life, you will never get a similar result. And that goes double for extraterrestrials.

Well, OK. We must say that don't know if we're honest in our opinion , but by now, in 2019, a whole robust school of biologists are suggesting that these very bright guys are, on these issues, completely wrong.

The Grand Old Man, who inspired the biologists who focussed upon WHY the adaptations which survive do so, was the gentlemen at the left: D'Arcy Thompson. This quote tells you where he was coming from philosophically:

"The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty."

and this: "Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed. They are no

exceptions to the rule that God always geometrizes. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science."

So some biologists began looking for the "mathematics" and the forceful constraints that natural environments put on the evolution of species.

In 1964, when Simpson (abetted by other tribal high priests like Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky) was railing against the non-prevalence of humanoids, a much less known biologist from Antioch College decided that such opinions were very likely dead wrong. Robert Bieri (left) was an ocean life biologist and ecologist. He had been studying fish forms and bone structures and was noticing the convergences. He stated:

"I would like to present arguments that if life has evolved on other planets

in other solar systems and if some population has reached the level of conceptual thought, it is highly probable that the organisms so endowed will bear a strong resemblance to Homo sapiens."

This presentation of the convergence view was not published in the ultra-prestigious Science magazine (as was Simpson's) but in the second tier journal American Scientist. ( I'm belaboring these unscientific "social issues" here because they matter. If one strays from the cant chanted in the Cathedral, one has difficulty being heard at all. )

Bieri presented his arguments based upon his studies and the somewhat fledgeling branch of convergent biological studies and arrived at several views in variance with the high priests. Because of the subject at hand (highly advanced mobile species), he directed his reasoning to complex predators. His thought concluded that such species would have complex central nervous systems based on a bilateral symmetric format. The species would be tubes with "mouths" leading down a tract to an end for waste elimination. Both the grasping and key sensing structures would be near this front end properly placed for effectiveness. Thus the brain of such organisms will be close to this front end.

Much more was said of course. Bieri was outlining the argument for humanoid form at an early moment in what would become a debate rather than just a declaration by the tribal elders.

Fortunately for science, which demands objectivity and a free examination of data-based ideas, help was soon on the way. In the 1980s your author noticed a welcome increase of discussion of convergent evolution studies at the annual symposia of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS --- the largest scientific meeting in the world each year.) These people weren't talking about extraterrestrial life, but, as they were talking about life facing laws of nature governing universal situations, their insights worked anywhere. Two of the advanced guard are pictured above: Duke colleagues Steven Vogel and Stephen Wainwright.

Vogel wrote the powerhouse overview, Life's Devices, in 1988. Its first chapter ("Constraints and Opportunities") tells you all you need to know. Wainwright was, for me, even more important. His masterwork, Axis and Circumference, also published in 1988, laid down the new thunder. Ultimate winning shape was rarely if ever random in fundamental structure --- details here and there, yes --- fundamentals, no. Published ironically by Harvard Press, it and others announced that there was a new sheriff in town looking after the Law.

There was a Star Trek episode where a crystalline entity described we humans as "ugly bags of mostly water." Leaving the ugly characterization to be judged by extraterrestrial Platonists, the fictional entity was generally correct, at least at the cellular level. Life is going to be originally a bag of mostly water. That bag or flexible spheroid might get larger, but it's abilities will be severely limited. For all of the earliest one and a half billion years of Earth life, single-celled bags of mostly water (whether globbed together in masses or sharing primitive chemistries merely by proximity) did very little on the scale of complexity.

Then Mother Nature allowed the discovery not only of true multicellularity (i.e. every cell does not have to be omnipotent in total organism active functioning --- some "specialization" can occur) but of the predatory tube. The organisms shaped like tubes with an intake end and an exit end, and capable of movement so as not to be held hostage by the vagaries of uncontrollable fluid flow, changed everything. They could go get food, or warmth, or whatever. They dominated. When you measure the explosions of life's variety, there is a strong simple relationship to the growing presence of predatory tubes. Note this commentary from a modern synthesis on the importance of this single development:

"The origin of predation is veiled in as much uncertainty as is the origin of life. Perhaps even more. Life, as we know it today, has a common origin, but predation --- in the broad sense of an organism killing another organism for nutritional purposes --- has originated many times at different levels of organismal interactions. We can assume, however, that whenever predatory lifestyles evolved they became a strong evolutionary force."

These predators immediately create a front and a back end. Unlike a sphere, they are no longer omni-symmetrical. And, hunting along the surfaces of solids where spheres might glob together and waft in the flows, they also get a top and a bottom.

Looking ahead, the predatory tube with its front and back, top and bottom, automatically coming via geometry and common "lifestyle" (where the food is located), will develop, as Robert Bieri and Stephen Wainwright tell us, a valuable preference for front-ended sensory apparatus near the feeding opening. Those sensory organs will mass and integrate there. We will end up calling it the "head" with its "brain." Since a species will usually not wish to drag its head and sense preceptors "through the mud," that head will tend to be above the mouth rather than below it. Survival in some analyses is simple, almost commonsensical given the circumstances faced by the majority of the predators who achieve large size.

Those big predators (essentially anything animal of any size) are ALL tubes with fronts and backs, tops and bottoms, heads and brains to the fore. You and I are. Our pet dogs and cats are. Ants are. Even Octopi are once you see their anatomy displayed. To the Star Trek alien, we are Predatory Tubes made up of cells like bags of water (plus some mineral deposits cleverly formed.)

The diagram shows the future stages of these original predatory worms after they elaborated the organs and mobility structures which valued mutations slowly packed around the universal internal channel. The cartoon leads to a standing quadruped, a humanoid form. Why that?

This is the point where the argument about humanoid form elsewhere requires the reader to keep several things in their head at once --- something that I have found no evidence that objectors to the concept do. What do we need to keep in consciousness?

1. Our analysis does not necessarily have to consider every possible form of intelligent life that arises anywhere "out there." 2. Our analysis DOES need to consider a specific (at least more specific than the widest net) type of advanced life: namely that form of life which could have developed advanced technology. If "they" don't develop advanced technology, they won't be getting here in things which look like advanced technology. 3. This obvious restriction in the argument means that these individuals are beings who have evolved to their high technology as a LAND dwelling species (whether they were ever a water-living species is irrelevant however interesting) --- they are required to be land dwellers to develop the technologies which control the major physical forces. 4. This is because the ONLY GATEWAY to getting beyond a very crude physical tool-using lifestyle is the control of Fire. Fire is the path to metals, and ultimately to electromagnetics, and motors, generators, engines and machines of all sorts. Science-fictionists may scream foul, but, sorry, there is no other way.5. Fire control needs air. It can't stand water. Advanced dolphins will be great to meet and who knows what they will think, but they won't be wielding metal technologies nor launching into space. We need somebody who developed on land.

Thus the drawing shows a landlubber with legs which then stands.

But why four appendages?

A few axioms: 1. The creatures that we are searching for are land animals for the reasons mentioned above, and many other reasons described in the evolutionary literature as well;

2. Legs give the predatory tubes huge advantages in locomotive speed on land. Most top land predators will have legs and not be slithering along the ground with all the resistance that takes;

3. Eyes using, as they do, Light as their information carrying medium, gather more information about moderate to distant situations than any

other physical means. And eyes are better when they have some height from which to look, rather being mired close to the ground. Getting ones head in the air is a big advance. These highly successful information gatherers will stand.

So, again, why four appendages? Did Howells' glib remark make any sense?

No, it didn't.

Every mutation faces a risk vs rewards game. Intuitively, one might suspect that if six, eight, or twenty appendages were a good thing, Nature would have selected those patterns long ago.

Well, Nature DID. But once one gets past the small scale world of insects et al, no such pattern survived and we all became big quadrupeds. Some folks balk at this, saying that it was just an accident. They are wrong. A leg has value that is true. It also has risk and expenditure. Having

four appendages vs six becomes a survival game where, to use street talk, the animal is hoping to get more out of it than it puts in. And especially, gets more out of it than it risks in a worse case scenario.

An advanced animal leg is a marvelous and highly structured thing. A powerfully structured thing. A thing with very strong connectors to face up to the big forces demanded by its big body. A lot of genetic and molecular "commitment" is required to make a large animal's leg.

If one gets diseased in that leg, one cannot just toss it off with the disease. If the dreaded predator chases you and grabs that leg, you can't simply abandon it. Big animal, big leg, and you are stuck with one another. As valuable as legs are, one doesn't want any extras which don't add much to the positive side of survival. Four appendages were optimal in the game of life for the first land animals which crawled out of the sea. They were the survivors who later stood up with their two walking legs and two manipulative ones. They had what they needed and no excess more (wherein the bad guy might bite and kill them in an area which contributed little to their lives.

But what about the insects then?

At their size environment, the game completely changes. Their small size allows less robust limbs and connectors. When the bad guy grabs a leg, they can just let it have it and scamper on. For them, the "extra" legs are a boon in an environment where gravity plays much less a role.

Multi-legs good little. Multi-legs bad big. It is not an "accident" that all the big non-snaky land prowlers have "humanoid form."

The current star convergent biologist is Simon Conway-Morris. His book, Life's Solution, lays out the entirety of the evidence and arguments for these points elegantly and in detail. Your author once had the pleasure of corresponding with Dr. Morris about the happy coincidence of his ideas about humanoid form and those that I, much more amateurishly, had written about in the "forbidden" UFO literature. Gratifyingly, Dr. Conway-Morris said that he appreciated the presentations very much, and would have even referenced them had he known. The good part of this generosity by him is that it shows that some academics are breaking away from the biases which hinder science. And some are even people who one would like to sit down to lunch, tea, and

conversation regularly.

Conway-Morris: "The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in the real world not all things are possible."

and ... " I don't think an alien will be a blob. If aliens are out there they should have evolved just like us. They should have eyes and be walking on two legs. In short if there is any life out there then it is likely to be very similar to us."

And what about that face?

The discussion about the humanoid sensors and placement in the face has been robust and very convincing. The basic predatory tube form automatically creates the front end/ back end geometry, plus the top/bottom distinctions and the left/right bilateral symmetry. The simple order of three dimensional space forces that much. Because of the bilateral symmetry, evolutionary development is pushed towards twinned structures with the exception of the singular tube ends. So, one mouth, but twinned else.

The eyes need to be high and out of the dirt. The olfactory sense needs to be near the mouth to warn it or entice it. The sound gatherers could be anywhere, but twinned and relatively high. Unless one attempts to engineer other unusual sense preceptors to go with these (and this is hard to come up with as rational truly useful "extra" structures), you have the components of the face ("facing" to the front where they must be for optimal effect) just so. Attempting to play around with alternative positioning indicates pretty quickly that unless one is operating in a very unusual geometric lifestyle (like a flounder always pressed to the sea bottom), you are not going to get radical variation from the humanoid face.

As far as lots more eyes, or nostrils in your rear, or whatever you want to come up with in imagination, remember that no matter how much "fun" the idea might be, IT WILL NOT SURVIVE unless it's a winner in the risks vs rewards game. Even extra eyes are places where one can be hurt and killed.

So there are good reasons why all these faces look just like you ... they DO, you know.

And there are equally good reasons why none of us look like this.

So when we come face to face with our cosmic cousins, we'll mainly be looking at ourselves though it might take us a moment to recognize them. Even at that level, the highly advanced tool-using civilization would have had for many centuries no need for "odd structures" (perhaps once offensive or defensive) hanging uselessly on their faces or bodies. Their structures, like our own, would have been cleansed of those excrescences, long replaced in their utilitarianism but clever technology (you don't need a horn if you have a gun.) Maybe even the

smooth uncluttered faces we deport might be the norm.

In every imaginative mind there are concepts of creatures which (alas) will not work. Nature's forces and their laws will not honor them, even if they accidentally arise in a mutation. Steven Gould said that if you ran back the film of life, it would never develop even remotely the same way. He was wrong.

Compute it again, Dr. Gould.