The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [110]
As for the great apes or monkeys succeeding had humans, Neanderthals, and the rest of our hominid ancestors gone extinct, apes have never shown any inclination toward progressive cultural evolution, now or in the fossil record, and monkeys proliferated throughout Asia and the New World for tens of millions of years without any interference from hominids, yet they didn’t take step one toward developing a complex culture.
The fossil record, while still fragmented and desultory, is complete enough now to show us that over the past thirty million years we can conservatively estimate that hundreds of primate species have lived out their lives in the nooks and crannies of rain forests around the world; over the past ten million years dozens of great ape species have forged specialized niches on the planet; and over the last six million years—since the hominid split from the common ancestor of gorillas, chimps, and orangutans—dozens of bipedal, tool-using hominid species have struggled for survival. If these hominids were so inevitable by the laws of evolutionary progress, why is it that only a handful of those myriad pongids and hominids survived? If braininess is such a predictable product of the unfolding powers of nature, then why has only one hominid species managed to survive long enough to ask the question? What happened to those bipedal, tool-using Australopithecines: anamensis, afarensis, africanus, aethiopicus, robustus, boisei, and garhi? What happened to those big-brained culture-generating Homos: habilis, rudolfensis, ergaster, erectus, heidelbergensis, and neanderthalensis? If big brains are so great, why did all but one of their owners go extinct?
Historical experiment after experiment reveals the same answer: we are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. It is tempting to fall into the oldest trap of all pattern-seeking, storytelling animals: writing yourself into the story as the central pattern in order to find purpose and meaning in this gloriously contingent cosmos. But skeptical alarms should toll whenever anyone claims that science has discovered that our deepest desires and oldest myths are true after all. If there is an inevitability in this story, it is that a purpose-seeking animal will find itself as the purpose of nature. That is what lies at the very core of alien agenticity.
Aliens and Gods
Aliens as intentional agents links the belief to religion and equates aliens with gods. This connection is well documented by the technology historian George Basalla’s intriguing book Civilized Life in the Universe. Basalla observes, “The idea of the superiority of celestial beings is neither new nor scientific. It is a widespread and old belief in religious thought. Aristotle divided his universe into two distinct regions, the superior celestial realm and the inferior terrestrial realm.” The incorporation of Aristotle into Christian theology carried this belief into the Middle Ages. “Christians populated the celestial regions with God, the saints, angelic beings of varying ranks, and the souls of the dead. These immortal celestial beings were superior to mortals, who inhabited the inferior terrestrial realm.” Even though the Copernican revolution overturned Aristotelian cosmology, “the belief that creatures living on a distant planet were superior to the human species” hung on into the modern age, and “religious elements continue to adhere to the perception of extraterrestrial life even as we study it in the twenty-first century.”35
In 2001, I conducted a study on the pioneers of SETI, most of whom were once religious but became either atheists or agnostics as adults.36 Radio astronomer Frank Drake—creator of the canonical