Evolution question: Are aliens really us?

Great Debates
1

(I figured there wasn’t a clear answer to this question, more of opinion/debate, hence the posting in this forum).

And creationists, please open another thread rather than hijack this one. This thread presumes evolution.

I was watching a National Geographic doco the other night where they did experiments on stone flies to work out the evolution of wings. Also an advert on TV where if the world was one hour old, humans as we know ourselves only appeared in the last hundredth of a second.

Which all means evolution must be pretty rapid. And presumably still happening, I can’t see why it would stop.

So my question is: how much are we humans still evolving, and is it detectable over the last few centuries/millennia? I know some theories posit that we are taller than our ancestors, but if that is due to nutrition does it count as evolution?

Then I thought about aliens. Tall, skinny, hairless, big heads, big black eyes. Maybe they are us in the future, grown puny from lack of physical activity, huge heads due to increased use of brain, hairless because I guess we are less hairy than our ape ancestors so are gradually balding as a species, big black eyes - not sure about that one - maybe only people with special eyelids get to survive a nuclear holocaust??? Maybe they are returning to us in time machines, not space machines, and their anal probes and other experiments are to extract our eggs and DNA to improve the species further (or “repair” it, should it have been damaged in some way).

OK now I am probably sounding mad. Never mind. My main question is serious though: how are we humans evolving, and how fast? And what do scientists expect us to look like in 1000 or 10,000 years time?

2

Regarding what may be more of your secondary point: The big disadvantage of your theory is that I can think of ways to achieve interstellar travel (although given the difficulty involved it seems awfully odd to then spend your time mucking around making pretty pictures in cornfields and diddling with the locals’ orifices). Time travel, on the other hand, seems more fundamentally impossible to me. (IANAPhysicist)

The big advantage is that the classic big-headed UFOnaut described in popular accounts is remarkably humanoid, far more so than seems remotely likely to be accounted for by “convergent evolution” between life forms which evolved in totally different star systems. Throw in the idea of human-ET “hybrids” (as is often done or at least implied), and you’re forced to conclude that these are our relatives.

A story to combine the best features of both stories: The aliens are related to us. Either some unknown human or hominid civilization achieved space travel a long time ago then died out here on Earth (“Atlantis”), or else (perhaps more likel) totally non-humanoid travellers took samples of humans or hominids thousands or millions of years ago; either way, the alleged UFOnauts are the now divergently evolved (or, in scenario 2, genetically messed around with by advanced non-humanoid life) relatives of Homo sapiens sapiens Terra. This would explain not only their remarkable resemblance to us but also their interest in this planet (and our DNA).

Still doesn’t say why a star travelling civilization would have any interest or need for a.) crop circles, b.) cattle mutilations or c.) anal probes–you’d think they’d have stuff that would make an MRI or a PET scan look like putting a rolled-up piece of paper to the patient’s chest. Unless, being our close relatives, they’re just kinky bastards who are in to that sort of thing.

3

Spores have been found in our upper atmosphere and it is entirely possible they might escape into space and be able to survive indefinitely out there until reaching favorable conditions for growth. If aliens are us, then spaceships and creatures with big black eyes aren’t the only way it could have happened.

4

Your account of how we would come to look like the aliens smacks of Lamarckism, so I’m not terribly convinced. Additionally, remember that no one has proved that aliens exist, let alone that they’re visiting us.

Still, it’s an interesting conjecture.

5

ok heres a big missunderstanding on your part, Evolution is not gererally considered to be happening “pretty fast”. some think that when it happens (genetic mutation that is) it can happen in a very short period of time but that is still longer than the 10,000 years of human history that we are reasonably familliar with.

as for the why it would stop, that depends on your view of evolution in general, although there are arguments that reasonably explain the end of human evolution fairly well for both the “evolution as a response to enviromental pressure” and the “evolution due to random genetic drift” theories.

humans have mostly ended the need to evolve due to enviromental pressure in todays world, at least in the 1st world countries. if anything I would expect to see a lapse to a stupider breed of human since theres little use for the huge brains we have in todays world, we have little use for all that spare grey matter.

and for genetic drift, the world gets smaller and smaller every day, the likely hood of a group of humans staying secluded enough, long enough for mutations to become dominant grows smaller right along with the relative size of the world.

as far as crop circles are conderned…dude the guys responsible for the prank fessed up YEARS ago.
There
Are
No
Alien
Crop
Circle
Artists
AT ALL!!!

6

my pet theory is that science will make us stupider. Way back when, in the good old days, before the Scientific Method, discovery was pretty much hit or miss, and was often attributed to a supernatural power. Not to mention the relative lack of passing along of information from one group to another due to differing philosophies/religions.

So, back then, we could come up with scientific discoveries by accident, or could come up with accurate observations or predictions based on hunches or “religious insight/visions” However, in order for these to have any accuracy, you need a lot of brain power to filter out the BS.

Now that we have a shortcut called the scientific method, we dont have to work as hard at being smart. We very well may be moving back on the scale of intelligence.

7

Ah so true.
There is so much proof of this in today’s world. We just got smart enough to figure out how to do things, not smart enough to figure out what really ends up happening when we do these things.

8

Still happening yes, evolution doesn’t end with us. “Rapid” however is probably not to good a description, unless over millions of years can be said to be “rapid.”

Modern man showed up longer ago than a few centuries/millenia.

Maybe, just as likely as anything else I guess

Not that fast, not by natural processes anyway. But then we are just beginning to be able to use genetic manipulation, cloning, etc.
The capacity to control our own evolution is within our reach, how we will use it is anyone’s guess. It sure as hell will make for interesting times though.

9

on reading this, i am reminded of 2 books: Galapogos, by Vonnegut, and The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley. the former was about a group of tourists who got stranded on the strangest islands (from an evolutionary standpoint) in the world, while the rest of the world was wiped out, and evolved in rather strange ways to be more like seals, as was necessary for survival, and rather strange mutations. the latter explores evolution over time from the anthropological scientist’s point of view, and has a great deal of interesting things to say about evolution of mankind.

anyway, i think it was in eiseley’s book that i read about the modern conception of aliens. it may have been elsewhere, i’m not sure. but it has been the tendency of man to evolve to have a larger head (bigger brain) and smaller chin, and the picture we have of aliens is just an extreme version of these things. so our conception of aliens, if false, is attributed to our concept of what human beings will evolve to be, as they have been evolving. eiseley also explores how in the early evolution of humans, a race appeared with a largery head and smaller jaw than we now have, and died out rather quickly (apparently they weren’t quite ready). but the idea remains, aliens are our conception of us several million years from now.

on the rapidity of evolution, it happens pretty quickly only in a very relative sense. if we consider the lifespan of the universe a year, life as we know it would’ve started as we counted down to the new year. not very rapid, as far as i’m concerned. but pretty damn quickly as far as the universe goes. anyway, there’s no reason AT ALL to suspect that life elsewhere (say mars or saturn) might evolve in the same manner as it did on earth, and there’s no reason to presume that the life here on earth is the only sort of life possible in the universe.

so i’ll just say, in my long-winded fashion, that our idea of what aliens are like is built on what a super-evolved human race must look like, that the human race hasn’t evolved significantly since asia was populated, and that our evolution is bound to continue as our lifestyles change. there’s pretty much no way to predict how. if we “master” changing our evolution, there’s the possibility that we’ll build some sort of super-human-race that will wipe out all the rest of us and take over, also one can imagine a scenario in which weather conditions make it such that only short people survive, and then the human race will be significantly shorter. these things are not things we can predict. and we will be long dead before they happen. so we can only guess.

lastly, does anyone have any idea where first appeared the idea of this super-evolved human as the epitome of aliens? when did we first decided that the people visiting us weren’t LGMs but tall, skinny, hairless humanoids with large eyes, small chins, and big heads?

-d-cubed

10

I’ve seen the idea that aliens are actually our future decendants before. (But then, how many ideas that anyone comes up with haven’t beem thought of already, and probably extensively discussed somewhere or other?)

It’s unlikely that humanity’s destiny will be determined by biological evolution as we commonly think of it. With genetic engineering, we’ll likely be able to alter our own genes far before any significant mutations occur. We’ll also probably be able to significantly augment our biological bodies with artificial add-ons and replacements. This will be much faster than bio-evolution, and assuming it becomes popular, the direction (or directions) the species takes will be a matter of our own choosing. That’s not to say that little grey space aliens won’t be our decendant’s chosen design, however, perhaps for some specialty purpose rather than for humanity in general.

But anyway, humans, or whatever replace us, will probably become more intelligent, not less, because that’s what they’ll want, and they’ll have the technology necessary to make that desire a reality. And I don’t just mean making their offspring more intelligent, I mean making themselves more intelligent. Dramatically. And in a fairly short span of time.

Just ask the Neo-human Guy

11

Thanks guys for all your responses. It’s very interesting. I’m not 100% sure that I believe in aliens (and 99% sure I don’t believe in crop circles being of alien origin, despite being scared to tears in Signs) but I am fascinated as to what we might become in x years time - millions rather than thousands it would seem from your answers.

Just today there has been this stuff on Yahoo! about how dogs may have only evolved from wolves a few thousand years ago. There’s also been a picture on Yahoo! of a new breed of dog. I realise this is “artificial evolution” in terms of it being accelerated by selective breeding, but still, it’s interesting. Could it happens with humans? Has it happened?

Well if aliens are future humans, society’s perception of beauty and sexiness is going to have to change bigtime, because those big grey things are so ugly I would never want to mate with one.

12

If anything, I would expect to see a physically weaker and frailer human. We humans are spending more time on intellectual persuits and less on physical ones. There just isn’t a need for a human to run faster or be stronger since machines do 90% of our manual labor.

13

Medicine will surely have a big impact. Because it prevents the “weaker strains” (sorry I know that sounds like some Hitler-esque eugenics which I do not espouse at all, but I don’t know the scientific description) from dying out, maybe we won’t evolve quite as otherwise we would have.

So it won’t matter if we’re weak or frail, because drugs can fix that.

14

I guess it would depend on the type of alien. There’s the possibility of life on other planets, then there’s the evolutionary future human theory. To my knowledge, I haven’t been abducted by aliens (well, a few, but they were either friends or family :slight_smile: ), so I really don’t know who the aliens really are. But I do think evolution will eventually warp homo sapiens into a different species. If modern homo sapiens traveled back in time and visited a group of australopithecine people, they would be surprised, but they would also realize how similar we are.

15

There is a book, forget the name, where in post-nuclear-holocaust world humans mutate from the radiation. But at the end it is realised that this was always meant to be, that they are now “homo superior” no longer plain old “homo sapiens”.

16

You should read Freeman Dyson’s book Imaagined Worlds. In it, one of our times brightest futurists predicts what may become of humanity in the next 10 years, then 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and finally a million years. Interesting stuff. He gets into theories concerning hive minds and shared perceptions/memories (which may be closer then most folks think).

Either way Devil’s Advocate is right on track. The next steps in the evolution of intelligence will be guided by intelligence. Instead of the shotgun-hail-mary method (sex & death), beneficial mutations will be designed and selected knowingly. We take the blind watchmaker and send him home.

Humanity has only 2 possible directions long term. Improve or destroy ourselves. Staying the same is the only thing that is not an option. Either we blow everything up or we continue improving technology to the point where we can improve our own abilities: intelligence, strength, scope, and longevity. Once that has occured we have moved past human and into transhuman territory. After that all bets are off. How can a chimp predict what a man will do?

Some interesting futurist sites:

Kurzweil AI
Singularity talk with Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
The Meaning of Life
World Transhumanist Organization
Homo Excelsior Technical Encyclopedia

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to call Alcor to check on my ice cube . . .

DaLovin’ Dj

17

Evolution, simplified, is basically that whoever survives long enough to have kids gets their genes passed on. In the past, that’s basically been that the ones who are best suited to the environment are able to mate, while the other ones less suited get killed.

Now, however, more and more people are surviving to an age where they can mate, due to modern medicine. Some of the weaker genes get passed down. So I think that we will get weaker humans in the future. Evolving to be stronger is unnecessary as we keep adapting to any weaknesses we may develop with new technology.

Also, there’s the fact that eventually humans will overpopulate the planet (if we don’t discover somewhere else to go). So perhaps humans will evolve to being able to survive on less.

18

Comparing professional basketball or football players with the rest of us, I’d say yes.

19

Oh that reminds me of a wonderful site on evolution (snigger, snigger!) www.darwinawards.com

For those who havent been to this site, it chronicles the events that led to the improvement of the human gene-pool, mostly people getting themselves killed in STUPID, STUPID ways. The logic is with a few more idiots out of the reproduction cycle, we might end up with smarter people over the course of time :smiley:

Do you believe in love at first sight? Or should I pass again?

20

The result of higher standards of living brought about by technological advances (including medicine) has been the steady decrease in birth rate throughout the world. While there are local problems with population and there is a not fully resolved danger of humans producing too much pollution to sustain themselves, all the current indications are that we will never overpopulate the world.