The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [108]
Good point. But the problem for both Dawkins and myself is our chauvinism. As Carl Sagan liked to say, we are carbon chauvinists. But we are also oxygen chauvinists, temperature chauvinists, vertebrate chauvinists, mammal chauvinists, primate chauvinists, and many others. The chauvinism that ETIs will communicate via radio signals, that their intelligence will take a form similar to ours, and especially that they are social beings who live in civilizations, are anthropomorphisms that have no basis whatsoever in reality. We cannot even communicate with terrestrial intelligences such as apes and dolphins, so what hubris of us to think that we will be able to decode the communiqués of an ETI millions of years our superior.
Here I strongly suspect that we are blinded by what I call Protagoras’s bias—“Man is the measure of all things”—when we project ourselves into the alien Other. Consider Neanderthals by comparison. If primate intelligence is so vaunted, why did they not survive?
Neanderthals as ETs
Neanderthals split off from the common ancestor shared with us between 690,000 and 550,000 years ago, and they arrived in Europe at least 242,000 (and perhaps 300,000) years ago, giving them free rein there for a quarter of a million years. They had a cranial capacity just as large as ours (ranging from 1,245 to 1,740 cc, with an average of 1,520 cc compared to our average of 1,560 cc), were physically more robust than us with barrel chests and heavy muscles, and they sported a reasonably complex toolkit of about sixty different tools. On paper it certainly seems reasonable to argue that Neanderthals had a good shot at “becoming us,” in the sense of a technologically advanced intelligent species capable of space travel and interstellar communication.
But if we dig deeper we see that there is almost no evidence that Neanderthals would have ever “advanced” beyond where they were when they disappeared 30,000 years ago. Even though paleoanthropologists disagree about a great many things, there is near total agreement in the literature that Neanderthals were not on their way to becoming “us.” They were perfectly well-adapted organisms for their environments.22
Paleoanthropologist Richard Klein, in his authoritative work The Human Career, concluded that “the archeological record shows that in virtually every detectable aspect—artifacts, site modification, ability to adapt to extreme environments, subsistence, and so forth—the Neanderthals were behaviorally inferior to their modern successors, and to judge from their distinctive morphology, this behavioral inferiority may have been rooted in their biological makeup.”23 Neanderthals had Europe to themselves for at least 250,000 years unrestrained by the presence of other hominids, yet their tools and culture are not only simpler than those of Homo sapiens; they show almost no sign of change at all, let alone progress toward social globalization. Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey noted that Neanderthal tools “remained unchanged for more than 200,000 years—a technological stasis that seems to deny the workings of the fully human mind. Only when the Upper Paleolithic cultures burst onto the scene 35,000 years ago did innovation and arbitrary order become pervasive.”24
Likewise, Neanderthal art objects are comparatively crude, and there is much controversy over whether many of them were the product of natural causes instead of artificial manipulation.25 The most striking exception to this is the famous Neanderthal bone flute dated from between 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, which some archaeologists speculate means that the maker was musical. Yet even biologist Christopher Wills, a rare dissenting voice who rejects the inferiority of the Neanderthals, admitted that it is entirely possible that the holes were naturally created by an animal