Evolving Thoughts

Alienus a me puto

518U4lsvgqL._SL160_.jpgI have mentioned Terence’s line Homo sum: nihil humani a me alienum puto before. It is a declaration that all that is human is not foreign to me. But there are aliens, or we suppose on reasonable grounds that there are, and Stephen Hawking thinks we should not engage them, for they will be, as P. D. Magnus puts it, jerks like us. But will they?

Few science fiction writers put much effort into thinking of the evolutionary biology and ethology of real aliens, usually taking analogies with elephants, crocodilans and anurans, bees, or whatnot as their starting point. But their ethology, or the species-typical behavioural range, is crucial to understanding how they might behave towards us (one of my favourite alien species are the reptilians in James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, in which they lacked the mammalian emotional centres that drive us and are coldly rational (and as a result behave purely in rational egoist ways, which means they are actually a lot nicer the than humans).

So, if we did meet or find out about an alien species, the first things we’d need to know would be their evolutionary history, their close relatives, and their sociobiology. Then, and only then, could we assess whether they would treat us well or not. My guess is that they will initially be as cautious about us as we are about them, so what would they need to know?

We are primates, with social dominance psychology and territoriality, so that makes us mildly confrontational and potentially dangerous. However, all species are potentially dangerous.

We are traders, and so we must compromise and communicate. There are artefacts in Europe that had to have been traded from central Asia back in the neolithic period. This means that we are potentially capable of exchanges in a relatively structured way.

We use symbolic communication. As primates we do this in a direct manner, such as vervet warning calls, but humans differ from their shared ancestry in one serious way, we use “displaced” communication: we can talk about things that are not present. This makes us able to form mental maps of complex phenomena, and so we might be able to “think” our way into the worldview of our visitors.

We are mammals, so we are altricial. This means we must form family groups. Such organisms are likely to be highly defensive of their young, but also capable of cooperation.

And finally, we construct our environment, so we are able to live in a range of otherwise hostile environments. This means that from their perspective, we may be able to construct theirs as well.

So they might think that we are potentially dangerous but also potential partners with whom they can live and talk and trade. If this is what they also value, then they could be very good to know. I think Hawking is being, literally and etymologically exactly, xenophobic.

Biology Evolution Philosophy Social dominance

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Comments (6)

  1. I’ve often thought that the basis of our psychology is evolving from a primate troop social background. I’ve wondered how comprehensible the motives of a star travelling species would be if they had a herbivorous herd evolutionary history or a wolf pack evolutionary history.

    Larry Niven uses the ‘herd background aliens’ and their psychology in ‘Footfall’. He also uses ‘pride background aliens’ in the Ringworld series. I think I can safely say that the various species don’t understand the others’ motives -without spoiling the plot.

    The biggest risks might come from ‘kind but naive’ aliens who casually distribute cheap energy generators or matter transmitters. Such gadgets could throw our world into turmoil. And that’s before they reveal the Secret Of The Universe….

  2. Yes, it is definitely xenophobic. Any group of aliens capable of mastering the exotic physics required for interstellar travel (if possible) would be highly intelligent, and would also be likely to have considerable experience encountering others different from themselves and fitting into some existing social structure of the galaxy (a galactic civilization or government?). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary, but an Independence Day scenario is unlikely. If space-faring aliens exist, we have almost certainly already been observed, and are probably not mature enough to contact yet. We are no danger to them until we are capable of interstellar travel.

  3. Well, we know that we are potentially dangerous but also potential partners with whom they can live and talk and trade, and this does not always make us good to know even in our dealings with ourselves. Part of the difficulty is that in trying to think of an alien civilization, we have difficulty thinking of anything that would definitely count as civilization and yet not have extensive structural and economic analogies with our own, even setting aside biological variation in individual or small-group behavior. And that’s precisely where the problem is. While it has become cartoonish since then (an unfortunate sign of diminishing self-knowledge), the origin of the hostile alien trope consists in precisely such an analogy. Wells’s The War of the Worlds simply asks the questions, “What if somebody showed up who was technologically as far beyond modern Britain as Britain is beyond Tasmania, and what if they treated Britain in the same way that the British treated the Tasmanians?” And all the major early versions ask similar questions. The anxiety arises because, in actuality, all civilized human beings do find some human things alien; and it’s an expression of worry that the aliens would be like the part of ourselves we like least. (The funny thing is, our xenophobia is one of the things that usually comes up as a feature of ourselves that we don’t like.)

    It does raise the interesting question of how economic and political structures crystallize out of the ethology, because we and they would both be more constantly affected by such structures than by individual and small-group behavior. They could be the nicest, friendliest aliens imaginable face-to-face, squeaking and purring like Tribbles, and still have political and economic institutions that roll over us like juggernauts and pretty much guarantee that we will be thoroughly exploited.

  4. In C.J. Cherryh’s “Foreigner” series, everything is based on how the aliens are *not* human, emotionally, the way family and political relationships have evolved, body language, etc. even though they are bipedal, humanish creatures.

    I love this series. Don’t start reading unless you are willing to invest a lot of time.

  5. There’s always the possibility that alien races exist, and we simply don’t recognize them as such.

    In order for a SFnal encounter with aliens to occur, the aliens would have to be not too different from us. E.g., we need to be able to compare them to something like elephants or bees or squid or bacterial mats. Without some kind of existing mental construct to compare them to, we’d be at a loss to process what we were seeing.

    Sufficiently foreign alien life may be indistinguishable from background noise.

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