New Scientist on evolution

[Ursa major]

Originally Posted by Dave

For some people it does indeed approach something of a religious conviction....

I think humans are rather prone to convictions of this sort. It is thus rather important that there is a structure - like, say, the scientific method - by which convictions can be challenged and overturned.

As an aside, some religious people go in for "scholarship", by which I mean they rely on trawls through past sayings to justify and explain things, rather in the way a lawyer looks for past cases to support their attempts to win their current case. While scientists do look through the literature, they are also obliged by the scientific method to open their eyes to the real world and test the literature against reality, rather than the other way around. (I'm sure this is also true of many religious people, by the way. And I'm aware that humans, being flawed, don't always do what they're obliged to.)

[TorrnT]

Creationists suffer from, "Confirmation bias" they should probably all go to their therapists and recieve some sort of counselling.
(Not being a Dr, obviously this can not be a professional conclusion, but based on what I have read on the matter so far)

Confirmation bias in psychology: Professor Scott Plous said, "We tend to be willing to gather facts that support certain conclusions but disregard other facts that support different conclusions".
(Professor Plous is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, and has been the recipient of several APA division awards, including the William James Book Award)

Where as science is non bias where facts are concerned

PS. as mankind becomes more educated (more schools, higher levels of education etc...) this cult will diminish but not disappear.

[Anthony G Williams]

As a follow-up to my blog post (25 April) about the New Scientist's feature on evolution, another development covered in the magazine (10 May) is the sequencing of the genome of the Australian duck-billed platypus. This has revealed some intriguing information, as might be expected of an animal which combines a bird-like beak with fur, and lays eggs while producing milk for its young. As expected, its genome contains a mixture of mammalian and reptilian features. The sequence for determining sex is more like a bird's than a mammal's, yet the milk-producing genes are similar to humans and cows. The conclusion is that milk-producing evolved before the ability to have live offspring.

Perhaps my marsupial saurians in 'Scales' weren't quite so implausible after all!

(An extract from my SFF blog)

[Ursa major]

There was another thread about this, AGW, based on a report about what was about to appear in Nature. Some of us were confused about the "10 sex chromosomes" the report mentioned; we assumed this was journalistic licence.

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Anthony G Williams

It is noticable that the debate within Christianity tends to polarise opinion. So the fundamentalists may claim it's a choice between "Darwin or Jesus", but of course there is no doctrinal support for such a statement, and the great majority of Christians have no problems with accepting evolution (including the last Pope, although the present one seems a bit wobbly...).

I've been away from this discussion for a few weeks, vacationing in London and Paris. While in London, I was pleased to find that Charles Darwin is entombed at Westminster Abbey. Apparently no agonizing choices had to be made at the time that occurred.

[Ehkzu]

This being a discussion of evolution in a science fiction forum, I'd like to propose something germane to that intersection:

While creationists don't understand evolution at all, the average sci fi reader and writer does...but doesn't understand how powerful convergence is in evolution.

Thus it's likely that intelligent aliens on other worlds look and act a lot like us. But sci fi writers/readers reject this proposition out of hand. We don't WANT this to be true. We want the Star Wars cantina.

Now the problem is that this point will never be proven. Up through the 1950s sci fi was full of stories about the swamps of Venus and the deserts of Mars and even intelligent aliens on worlds like Jupiter. Now we know better, and that's all gone away. Ditto all the spaceships that weren't computerized, that lacked solid state displays and whatnot.

But we'll never get out of this solar system (hope I'm wrong, but I'm not), and they'll never get here (again, hope I'm wrong, but I'm not). So John Q Sci Fi reader/writer may well continue to hold ideas about intelligent life elsewhere that go against what current biology tells us.

Let me add that it's not like I haven't seen some wild alternate life forms. I'm a scuba diver currently planning my 5th dive trip to Indonesia, and the stuff I've seen there makes my head spin just thinking about it.

But none of them are advanced technology using critters.

And I put it to you that that requires a terrestrial bipedal hominid. We have an evolutionary model for that. We don't have one for any other path, and I've never read a sci fi novel or seen a sci fi movie that provided a compelling one.

I'm also invoking what scientists call the Principle of Mediocrity--that, in general, whatever is, is average.

No Star Wars cantina. Deal with it.

[Delvo]

Most (I think all) of the "people" in that scene did fit the description you just gave.

[Dave]

Not to mention most, if not quite all, Star Trek aliens (with the odd nose-piece or forehead piece and a hairpiece.)

Ehkzu did say "average sci fi reader and writer" though, and not TV and film watchers. I thought that the reason all TV and most older film-aliens looked like 'a man in a suit' was simply a question of budgets, nothing to do with an idea of convergence.

While it is true that similar stable environments produce species that are alike - wolves, dingos and hyenas - your theory predisposes that intelligent life can only exist on an Earth-like planet and that your local terrestrial biped has stopped evolving. I don't think either of those are true, certainly not the second.

[Ehkzu]

TV aliens looked like us (especially before CGI) due to budget limitations, to be sure. Plus we relate to critters that look like us. Hence anthropomorphism across much/most of world literature/folk traditions. You could argue that intellectually lazy people might favor anthropomorphic aliens. Perhaps. But I'm arguing that it's just as intellectually lazy to assume that they couldn't look like us.

We're also getting into a sort of fundamental debate within the biological scientific community. One school of thought--exemplified by the late Stephen Jay Gould--would argue for wildly different intelligent aliens. Some call these people splitters. They focus on the historical accidents that led to our current array of critters here on Earth.

The other school of thought, called lumpers, believe that ultimately convergent forces trump historical accident--especially when it comes to something as special as intelligent life. I'm in this school.

I assume Earthlike planets because (1) those are the only kind we know for sure can support intelligent life; (2) the exobiological jury seems to be in and indicates that alternative environments probably wouldn't support much beyond something like bacteria. For example, it appears that silicon-based biochemistry would only have an advantage over carbon-based ones under cold conditions that didn't support liquid water--as I recall it would use liquid methane. But metabolism would be sloooow. Too slow for intelligence to operate I think.

I did once read a poorly written but intellectually intriguing sci fi novel about intelligent beings the size of rice grains living on the solid surface of a neutron star. It was called The Dragon's Egg, I think, and the author was indeed an astronomer specializing in neutron stars. But he was no biologist and the book contained no kind of evolutionary model that would lead to such creatures evolving there.

A solidly researched book supporting these conclusions is Rare Earth (Amazon has it). It's a sobering look at just how particular and rare (in the universe) are the conditions required for intelligent life.

I should also point out that stable environments aren't the only ones containing powerful convergent forces. Unstable ones do as well, and may well be the ones producing intelligence. Stable conditions produce specialists. They know what to eat, how to live, yada yada. The dinosaurs dominated the last truly stable Earth environment. Unpredictable environments require opportunistic feeders--with the cleverness require to figure out new situations. Ravens are a great example, for example. Probably the smartest bird on Earth, and astonishingly opportunistic. An adult raven can observe a string tied to a branch with food at the end and deduce without experimentation that if he flies to the branch and pulls up the string he'll get the food.

Stable environments, OTOH, produce critters like koalas. One food, one situation, the brains of a turnip.

As for us having stopped evolving--actually there's reson to believe that we are evolving in some ways due to there being so darn many of us. But it's stuff like being able to digest milk as adults (mainly found in Euro/African populations), or blue eyes and blond hair (probably as sexual attractants, and now dying out since they're recessive traits and everyone's interbreeding).

Nothing indicates our descendants will be anything other than terrestral hominids. Evolution is a response to changing environments and/or gene drift, where particular mutations confer a reproductive advantage. But since we started evolving our external evironment--clothing, technology, farming etc.--the pressure on us to evolve the old fashioned way has diminshed greatly.

The only reproductive advantages today seems to be belonging to the lower classes or to particular religions that foster having large families. So perhaps our remote descendante will be dumber than us. Something to look forward to. But they'll be dumb terrestrial hominids.

But really, apart from disease resistance to particular pathogens, where's the evolutionary force acting on us to change us? It's not like only the strongest and the smartest are breeding, is it now? We encourage even people with Down's syndrome to marry and have lots of kids. We've adopted anti-eugenics.

And a note about science fiction: I think the way in which science proper closes off certain avenues of possibility, while opening others, benefits this genre of literature. If anything's possible nothing is interesting. As a scuba diver it helped me a lot to learn about the evolutionary forces acting on the fascinating creatures I see while diving. Reef fish are colorful because they can get away with displays that would help predators too much if they didn't have a nearby reef to dive into when danger appears. So they can display fantastic colors due to sexual competition.

Things ae the way they are for reasons. I've enjoyed fantasy that's internally consistent at least, such as Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These have well-developed internal universes. But I also enjoy sci fi where they keep down the black box count and provide solid extrapolations from what we know now.

As I said before, nobody writes about the swamps of Venus now unless they can provide an explantion for how the planet was terraformed over eons--I could write such a story, starting with setting up a mylar parasol at Venus's Lagrangian point between it and the sun, so the sun's radiation was cut down enough to give it an Earthlike surface temp. But I digress. The point is we know what Venus is like and so we don't write stuff that ignores this. The problem with what I'm saying about evolution is that sci fi writers and readers do not know what we've learned about evolution lateley, and it's easy to find Gould-ites arguing for historical happenstance trumping convergence.

So we keep seeing sci fi that ignores stuff that's really just as known today as the surface temperature of Venus.

I just wish every bachelor degree required liberal arts types to know a lot more about science, and budding engineers/scientists to know a lot more about the arts.