Page 32 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2015

32 Is Hawking Right About Hostile Aliens?
Is Stephen Hawking Right
About Hostile Aliens?
by Stephanie Pappas
E.T. was the perfect extraterrestrial: Cute, smart
and — best of all — a perfect pacifist.
Unfortunately, scientists aren’t so sure
that an actual intelligent alien would be so
benign. In a recent interview with El País,
famed physicist Stephen Hawking posited that
an alien visitation would put Earthlings in the
same position as Native Americans when
Columbus landed on their shores.
“Such advanced aliens would perhaps
become nomads, looking to conquer and
colonize whatever planets they can reach,”
Hawking speculated.
The likelihood that intelligent life is out tools, but chimpanzees use tools without
there is up for debate; less discussed are the
conditions necessary to evolve a life-form that’s
both smart and nice. But the lessons from Earth
suggest that intelligence and aggression might
evolve hand-in-hand.
Evolving smarts
No one really knows how humans got to be so
clever. What’s clear is that hominin brains
began expanding wildly about 2 million years
ago. (Hominins include those species after the
human lineage — the genus Homo — split from
the chimpanzee lineage.) By around 100,000
years ago, humans made the never-before-seen
leap to inventing language. And by at least
40,000 years ago, our ancestors were making
art.
“We have brains that are three times
bigger than those of our closest relatives,” said
Mark Flinn, an anthropologist at the University
of Missouri who has researched the emergence
of human intelligence. Humans have
unprecedented abilities to think about each
other’s thoughts and motivations, he said, to
play out social scenarios in their brains and to
think about the past and future.
“The general presumption is that this is
just sort of a natural outcome of the
evolutionary process, but that’s really giving
short shrift to the very special circumstances of
human evolution,” Flinn said.
Huge brains are expensive. They take an
enormous number of calories to grow and
function (up to 50 percent of intake in infancy
and childhood, Flinn said) and make humans
basically helpless for years after birth.
“Our babies are born as larvae,
basically,” said David Carrier, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Utah.
Many anthropologists and evolutionary
biologists have tried to pinpoint the special
circumstances that make these huge brains
worth the expense. Charles Darwin suggested
that perhaps males developed cleverness to
attract females, much as a male peacock
developed showy tail feathers to prove to
potential mates that he could strut his stuff. But
if brains were just for sexual display, scientists
would expect to see big differences between
male and female intelligence — females, not
having to attract mates, shouldn’t waste so
much effort on their brains, much as peahens
don’t waste effort on growing shiny feathers
(theirs are dull and brown). And female humans
are just as smart as males.
Social pressure
Would smart aliens have energy-intensive
brains? Hard to say — perhaps E.T. could
evolve a more efficient, yet just as clever, organ. it’s a dynamic challenge and it’s also creative,”
But if aliens were sending signals into space or
building rockets, they’d have to have achieved
an intelligence that far exceeds what is needed
to survive.
Humans have done the same, and
researchers can’t quite figure out why. The brain
could have evolved to allow humans to use
developing complex languages, art and culture.
One provocative theory holds that pathogens
play a role: The brain is vulnerable to infection,
wrote Hungarian researcher Lajos Rózsa in a
2008 article in the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Showing off one’s cleverness may be a way of
showing off how resistant one is to infection.
After all, if you’re smart enough to invent
language and art, you must be pretty good at
battling brain parasites.
So perhaps intelligent aliens might be
subject to alien parasites. Flinn and his
colleagues favor another theory, though. They
argue that humanity underwent a runaway cycle
of brain evolution because of hominins’ social
nature.
The ecological dominance-social
competition hypothesis works like this: Human
ancestors reached a point in which their
interactions with one another were the most
important factor in whether they’d survive and
pass on their genes. Finding food and shelter
was still important, Flinn said, but it wasn’t the
main factor determining evolutionary success.
The difference between clever humans and, say,
caribou, is that intraspecies relationships drove
evolution the fastest in humans, Flinn said. A
herd of caribou has social interactions, to be
sure: Males have to fight for mates, for
example. But a more pressing concern would be
avoiding predators and finding food. For
hominins, these external issues became
relatively less important, the theory goes, while
their ability to form coalitions, to have empathy
and to behave in such a way as to win
friendships from others became key to their
survival.
In this heavily social context, it became very
important to be smarter than the competition.
Each generation got a little smarter and a little
better at building complex social relationships,
which created a feedback loop in which even
smarter brains were beneficial.
“The thing about social competition is
Flinn said. “You need to have the better
mousetrap every time. The competition adjusts
to the current winning model, so you need to be
one better than the current winning strategy.”
The model seems to work with other
clever animals, too, he added. Dolphins, orcas
and chimps all form social coalitions with each
other and depend on their social groups to
survive. It’s possible that this social factor
would hold for species on other planets, too.
The evolution of aggression
A key part of this theory is competition. Chimps
form coalitions that battle against other chimps.
And humans are far from peaceful. So if an
alien species were to evolve intelligence, would
aggression be an inevitable part of the package?
Perhaps. The evolution of aggression is
a question unto itself. Fights to the death occur
only in species where the options are mate or
die, Carrier said.
“If you can walk away from a fight and
reproduce another day, you do that,” he said.
“But if circumstances are such that your ability
to reproduce is threatened by a competitor, in
that situation it makes sense to fight.”
Environmental factors may determine
whether a mate-or-die system emerges. For
example, chimpanzees are a particularly
homicidal (chimpacidal?) species, Carrier said.
Work by primatologist Richard Wrangham at
Harvard University and colleagues finds that
chimp “wars” arise from a chimpanzee’s
territorialism. Small groups of foraging chimps
may come into contact with other chimpanzees;
killing these competitors (particularly when the
foragers have numbers on their side) can be
beneficial by opening up access to more
resources.
(Continued on Page 33)
THE ‘X’ ZONE RADIO SHOW
with ROB McCONNELL
M-F, 8 PM - Midnight
www.xzoneradiotv.com