From: "Terry W. Colvin" 
Subject: IUFO: Elephants on Mars - Part One
Date: 16 Dec 2000 01:19:14 -0500
To: "iufo@topica.com" ,
        "skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu" ,
        UASR 

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Fortean Times 134, June 2000, pp. 40-44

Elephants on Mars - Part One

This Island Earth

Ufologists tend to think they are way ahead of the plodding astronomers in
their thinking about extraterrestrial civilisations.  Peter Brookesmith begins
a three-part examination of the ufological belief in the existence of those
alien worlds and finds that it is the ufologists who have not kept up to date
with the latest discoveries.

One of the cornerstones of modern ufology is that some UFOs might well
be visiting spacecraft from distant worlds.  The 'extraterrestrial hypothesis'
(ETH) for the origin of UFOs is the foundation for many of the popular
beliefs about UFOs and their alien pilots celebrated and perpetuated in
books and films.  This ETH seems, at first glance, to be quite reasonable,
but does it stand up to scrutiny?  Is life so prolific in the universe that
we must expect, as the ufologists believe, that other civilisations, more or
less like ours, have arisen on other planets, more or less like ours?  And is
it reasonable to expect that some of them will be advanced enough to send
craft out to explore distant space?  And are UFOs proof of those craft?

Yes, yes and yes, argues Professor Michael Swords [of Michigan] in a
widely-cited essay.(1)  On the matter of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI),
many ufologists defer to him, but the evidence shows that this line of
reasoning is fundamentally flawed.

According to Swords: "The ETH is a natural concept to occur to anyone
seriously looking at the UFO phenomenon."  As one reads through his brief
but influential essay, one realises that by "a natural concept," Swords means
that, as conclusions go, the ETH is an easy one to jump to.  In a technological
culture much occupied by thoughts of space travel - as ours has been since
World War II - and drenched in imagery from half a century of science-fiction
about spacefarers before that, such a leap of the imagination is fair enough,
perhaps even predictable.  But that doesn't make the ETH a 'natural'
hypothesis in any scientific sense.

And when Swords does get down to science, he presents a remarkably partial
and partisan case in dealing with the conditions necessary for life to emerge
on any given planet, and for what happens if it does appear.  His account
certainly doesn't reflect any prevailing scientific consensus on either matter.

Everyone who discusses the ETH runs up against the problem that the one
example of a planet bearing (ostensibly) intelligent life that we know anything
about for certain is our own.  At the most conservative estimate there are
some 4,000 million stars in the Milky Way that could support life as we know
it.  To do so, those stars would also need a planet orbiting them in the
'habitable zone,' at just the right distance from its sun so that sizeable
bodies of water - the absolute essential for life to develop and thrive -
could form without freezing solid or boiling away, and with just enough mass
to provide the gravity to hold that water, and an atmosphere, on its surface.
There are other idiosyncrasies of our planet that have contributed to our
presence - and that of microbes, marsupials and mushrooms - upon it; we'll
come back to those later.

For Professor Swords (right), the Milky Way is "brimming with ETI."  He
suggests that, given a Sun-like star, it is virtually inevitable that a
planetary
system will form around it, and that the planets will fall into a standard
pattern strangely similar to that of our own Solar System, and that "most
systems ought to contain one Earth-like life-bearer."

This remark comes shortly after a curious sentence, which deserves
examination: "In the mid-1990s the astronomy community [sic] has at last
recognized the direct detection of planets around several nearby stars."

What there was to "recognize" is hard to say.  Early claims to have found
extra-Solar planets never really stood up to close scrutiny but, since 1994,
armed with improved equipment and techniques, astronomers have
unequivocally detected about 18 extra-Solar planets.  The nearest star
to Earth with a claimed (but unconfirmed) planet is Lalande 21185, 8.5
light years away (Lya); there's also been a fleeting glimpse of something
possibly orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 Lya.
Most of the others are around 50 Lya or so.  The furthest - and the first
to be found - were pulsars; one with three planets and one with one, 1,600
Lya and 20,000 Lya respectively.  Finding pulsars with planets came as
something of a surprise.

Most of the planets so far detected are as big as or bigger than Jupiter -
massive, in other words.  Even the smallest, at around half Jupiter's mass,
are enormous by the Solar System's standards.  That such vast bodies
should be the first to be detected is not surprising, given the limits of
astronomers' equipment and techniques.  But these gas giants are rarely
at Jupiter-like distances from their suns: eight are in unexpectedly
close orbits and nine have highly eccentric orbits - both of these
conditions are not remotely promising for the emergence of life.  Some
of these bodies, it is speculated, are not planets at all, but 'brown dwarves' -
proto-stars too small to ignite.  As this article is written, news of another
typically atypical extra-Solar planet has just broken.  It orbits the star
HD75289, in the southern constellation Vela, once every 3.5 Earth days,
at a distance of 6.9 million km - one-twentieth the distance of the Earth
from the Sun.  The Swiss astronomers who discovered the planet calculate
its mass as at least 0.42 times that of Jupiter, or 1.4 times the mass of
Saturn.

The discovery of such planets - unexpectedly large and close to their star -
has blown apart the old presumption (enthusiastically endorsed by Swords)
that all planetary systems conform to a 'standard' that scientists, somewhat
solipsistically, believed was set by our own.(2)  If these newly-discovered
planetary systems turn out to represent the rule - and our Solar System
is the exception - then life is by no means common in outer space.  In the
first part of this article, I'll explain how this undermines Swords' belief
in the ubiquity of spacefaring civilisations.

According to veteran planet-finder Geoffrey Marcy of California State
University at San Francisco, the implication of the increasing number of
discoveries of Jupiter-sized planets close to their stars is clear: "None
of us would be here if we had such a solar system.  These Jupiters constitute
a death knell for any possible habitable planet as we know it."(3)

The late Carl Sagan - one of the foremost promoters of a scientific search
for extraterrestrial intelligence, summed up the surprise neatly.  Sagan had
predicted the discovery of Jupiter-sized planets… "Then in two years, pop,
pop, pop, there they are.  Very gratifying for a scientist.  On the other
hand, every one of those planets is in a place where it shouldn't be.  They
are all much closer to their star than I had figured, than our Jupiter is
to our Sun.  That means the idea that solar systems are made by some
cookie-cutter process is dead wrong.  It might even mean that our kind
of solar system is atypical, that more typical are solar systems with the
big guys on the inside.  It's a much more interesting universe now that we
realize that there is probably a huge diversity of solar systems - not just
that they exist, which is exciting enough, but that they may all be
different."(4)

Here, Sagan illustrates the difference between real science and a
pseudo-science like ufology: he goes where the evidence takes him,
despite his well-known hopes.  Facts rarely stand in the way of
ufological convictions.  That "cookie-cutter" hypothesis had actually been
under siege for some time.  In the 1980s, a number of scientists from
different disciplines began to ponder the intricate links between
cometary impacts, the movement of tectonic plates, the evolution of
life on Earth, and the evolution of planetary systems themselves.  In
their view - expressed by Harvard astrophysicist Ursula Marvin as
early as 1988 - the impacts of objects from outer space could be
considered "a geological process of major importance."

This deceptively simple shift of perspective effectively demolishes
the classical geology of Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and the evolutionary
theory of his younger contemporary and friend Charles Darwin (1809-82).
Both presupposed a gradual (uniform) development across the aeons of
both the Earth's crust and the flora and fauna upon it.  These smooth
assumptions are severely jangled by the notions that volcanic activity
and the behaviour of tectonic plates may be affected by impacts of
comets and asteroids.  In the new view, these, essentially random
impacts may determine the survival of living species as radically as
they affect geological processes.

There is no lack of evidence to support this view.  It's estimated that
in the last 400 million years there have been 200,000 impacts equal to,
or larger than, the 30m- (98ft)-wide meteor that smashed into the
Arizona desert at 70,000 kph (43,500 mph) to punch out the Meteor
Crater, 175m (574ft) deep and 1.5km (0.9 miles) across.  That's one
massive impact every 2,000 years.  The latest of these extraterrestrial
bombs was the 60m- (196ft)-wide fragment from Comet Encke that
devastated 2,000 sq km (772 sq miles) of forest in the Tunguska
region of Siberia in 1908, in a blast about equal to a 10-megatonne
nuclear explosion.  (A few diehard UFO buffs still maintain the
Tunguska event was the crash of a nuclear-powered spacecraft - see
FT127:28-30.)  Between 500,000 and 1.5 million 'Arjuna' asteroids -
each big enough to create another Tunguska - are in chaotic near-Earth
orbit and about 50 of them pass between us and the Moon every day.[???]
Just one of those plunging onto a major city could alter the global
political balance for generations, possibly forever.

There is a huge population of comets, asteroids and planetesimals in
unstable and unpredictable orbits within or near the Solar System, ready
to smack into Earth and reboot history.  Over 160 asteroids have been
found with diameters of more than 1km (0.6 miles) and with orbits that
intersect Earth's.  A collision with one of these would have an effect
approaching that of the impact of the 100-trillion-megatonne cometary
impact 65 million years ago (Mya) at Chicxulub, Mexico; the event, most
scientists believe, that hastened the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 Mya
(FT111:34-37).

According to Jim Scotti of the University of Arizona, an asteroid only
2km (1.2 miles) across would create a blast that "could devastate global
agriculture."(5)  Some 367 Mya, an impressive 6km (3.7 miles) object blew
a 100km (62 miles) crater in what's now Nevada - ironically, just where
ufology has been blessed by the presence of Area 51.  A similar cataclysm
250 Mya brought the Permian age to an end by obliterating 95 per cent of
extant species of marine invertebrates.

How many times the Earth has narrowly escaped such devastating collisions
is anyone's guess, but it's a sobering thought that, on 10 August 1998, an
asteroid known as 1998ML14 came within 1.5 million km (932,100 miles) of
Earth.  It was 1.5km (1 mile) wide and travelling at 80,000 kph (50,000
mph) and first spotted only six weeks earlier; had it hit Earth, it would
have destroyed everything within 3,000km (1,900 miles) of the impact
point, created a tidal wave 27km (17 miles) high, destroyed the world's
crops and killed an estimated 1.5 billion people.  The aftermath would have
been a decades-long 'nuclear winter,' total economic chaos and, conceivably,
the eventual decline of humanity.

The point is that, not only are these impact events unpredictable in
themselves, their effects on the subsequent evolutionary 'progress' of any
surviving lifeforms would also be quite unpredictable.

Herbert Shaw, a researcher with the United States Geological Survey at
Menlo Park, California, is an outspoken proponent of the view that our Solar
System cannot be adequately described by linear mensuration and easily
isolated instances of cause and effect.  Instead he sees it as a dynamic
system, subject to interlinked and interactive internal and external forces
whose unpredictable behaviour is better described by the fractal mathematics
of chaos.

The intellectual revolution proposed by Shaw's monumental book - _Craters,
Cosmos, and Chronicles: A New Theory of Earth_ (Stanford University Press,
1995) - is a further blow to the old uniformitarian geophysics.  Its most
mind-bending implication is the suggestion that synchronicity may extend
beyond correlations of volcanic events with meteoroid impact events to
phenomena as widely separated in space and time as biochemical genetics
and intergalactic dynamics.

Shaw is arguing for a way of looking at earth sciences that is - though me
may baulk at the term - holistic.  Such thinking has been habitual with
ecologists, environmentalists, and intelligent family physicians for decades.
What is new is the acceptance of chaos theory - and therefore a principle of
capriciousness - into systems and theories that were previously thought to
be uniform and predictable; here is a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the making.
Such ideas have already been welcomed by astronomers, planetologists,
paleontologists and biologists - key players in any game involving
extraterrestrial intelligences.

Recognition of the chaos inherent in and around the Solar System has
sensitised scientists to the possibility of disarray in nature.  A recent
example - recounted by Mike Davis - is how, in the hour before NASA's
Galileo probe was incinerated in the atmosphere of Jupiter, it transmitted
data "so offbeat that researchers scrambled to see if their instruments
had run amok."  Most of the predicted atmospheric water was missing, a
shortfall that invalidates existing models of Jupiter's energy budget and
chemistry.  In essence, continues Davis: "Theory has been unable to
predict planetary composition or dynamics in advance of exploration…
Each [planet] instead is an eccentric individual with its own chemical and
tectonic identity."(6)  If planets in our Solar System refuse to conform
to theoretical prediction, we can place no faith in smug predictions about
the nature of satellites in other systems.

Mike Davis summarises the essential argument of Australian cosmochemist
Stuart Ross Taylor: "In particular, [Taylor] disputes elegant [..] theories
of the system's origin like the "equilibrium condensation model" [..] with
its postulates of a chemically zoned nebula and an orderly process of
planetary accretion… Even in its most general features [..] the present
solar system cannot be theoretically 'deduced' from the equations of the
state of the original solar nebula."

Taylor's Solar System is chaotic - and impact cratering is its existential
moment.  The major planetary features "are the result of events that
might readily have taken a different turn."  Taylor concedes that "other
planetary systems doubtless exist," but a repetition of the distinct
sequence of events which resulted in our present Solar System is as likely
as "finding an elephant on Mars."

None of this work is cited by Professor Swords, and it makes a shambles
of his claim that the "way in which planets are arrayed is thought to be of
a standard pattern" and that with "similar forces and materials at work,
planets should be similar, chemically and physically, to those in our own
system."  In the nitty-gritty of the real Universe, those planets actually
discovered around other star do not support Swords' contention that
life-bearing planets are the inevitable companions of Sun-like stars.

The new thinking described by Mike Davis is not some kind of scientific
fringe cult.  Earth scientist Peter J Smith, of the UK's Open University,
says that "there can be little doubt at all" that impact theory and its
consequences are "a revolution comparable to that of plate tectonics.
The argument now is chiefly over the steps by which impacts are
translated into major terrestrial phenomena."(7)  Swords' science here
is simply, and radically, obsolete.

Well before 1997 - when, we may suppose, Swords prepared his _UFO
Encyclopedia_ paper - interested scientists were beginning to realise
that Earth was peculiarly protected by its huge neighbour Jupiter and
that this played a part in the emergence of life on Earth.  Jupiter's role
as Earth's guardian was recognised in the early 1980s, when comet
showers were first seriously discussed among astronomers.  Then, in
the early 1990s, George Wetherill, of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, proposed that the gas giant's powerful gravity field
attracts incoming objects that might otherwise smash into the Earth,
causing untold environmental damage.(8)  This was demonstrated for
all to see in the summer of 1994, when images relayed from the Hubble
space telescope showed the fragmented Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
ploughing into the giant planet with the force of a multi-million-megatonne
explosion.

The significance of this spectacular event seems to have by-passed Swords,
just as the significance of the so-called 'K-T event' - the cometary impact
65 Mya at Chicxulub, Mexico - apparently failed to strike him.  The K-T
event contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs and the rise of
mammalian life, whose development was likely given another boost 10
million years later by climatic changes following a huge (and just as
unpredictable) submarine volcanic eruption in the Caribbean.

The lesson is surely plain: Earth is peculiarly suited to encourage the
emergence of life, and that life is guarded from constant setbacks
through extraterrestrial attack by the presence of Jupiter.  At the
same time, we are here because some cometary impacts have evaded
our giant gatekeeper, resetting the evolutionary clock on various
occasions and in ways no one could have predicted.  Humanity stalks
the Earth today because of chance interplanetary events in the past,
and only narrowly survives further cataclysm.(9)  Our future is no more
assured than our past has been.

But for humanity to arise at all, life itself had to occur in some primitive
form.  According to Michael Swords: "Given [..] a common chemistry
operating in a common fluid (water), and within a common force
environment, today's biochemists (calling themselves 'cosmo-chemists' and
'protobiologists') suspect that simple life forms will arise like a shot."

So far, so good, but not good enough to justify thinking UFOs are ET
craft or even that the galaxy is flush with extra-terrestrial intelligence.
One reason life on Earth continued to evolve beyond a simple, unicellular
stage is seasonality.  Earth is titled some 23.5 degrees from the plane of
its orbit around the Sun and, consequently, the alternating seasons put
pressures on early lifeforms to evolve in response to a continually
changing environment.

Those first forms were aquatic.  Intelligent, technologically accomplished
life as we know it today is terrestrial; it is dependent on air, not only to
breathe but to feed the fires that, ultimately, drive the engines of
industry, technology, and science.  An aquatic animal, no matter how
intelligent or creative, is not going to build a steam engine, a steel mill…
or an interstellar spacecraft.

Professor Swords explains this as engagingly as did Isaac Asimov in 1984 -
in a similar passage from his New Guide to Science,(10) - but like Asimov
he omits any mention of the crucial function of the seasons in evolution.

Crucially, Swords also omits to note the key part the Moon has played in
the evolution of life on Earth.(11)  For it was the Moon that initially lured
our vertebrate ancestors out of the oceans.  It is the Moon's gravity that
tilts the Earth, creating the seasons; it also creates the ebb and flow of
tides, so that animals living in coastal waters were subject to yet more
evolutionary pressure.  Those who could not survive being stranded by the
ebb tide died off.

Eventually, a random mutation in a small complex of fishes - including
lungfish, coelacanths and rhipidistians - gave them a unique fin skeleton;
one that - unlike that of other fishes, it is important to say very clearly -
was capable of evolving, in turn, into limbs.(12)

Take the Moon away and life on Earth may have evolved no further than
prokaryotic bacteria or acellular organisms.  Does Swords imagine that the
legions of worlds on which, he proposes, intelligent life has arisen, have all
had unexpected encounters with massive objects, creating a moon and tidal
system that would trigger the evolution of complex life?

 Before we even begin to contemplate Swords' view of evolution, we are
confronted by the peculiarity of Earth… placed at just the right distance
from the Sun to maintain water in its liquid state; just the right mass to
retain an atmosphere; sheltered by Jupiter from too disruptive a series of
random attacks from planetesimals; and with a giant satellite to tilt it at
just the right angle from its orbital plane to produce the seasons, variety
of climates, and tidal system that will act as a catalyst for biological
evolution.  And this extraordinary engine - which, it is now recognised,
was created by chance - represents the minimum of preconditions for
life to evolve.  Not for life to exist, perhaps, but to evolve, beyond the
organisational level of microbes.  If Earth's circumstances are the unique
product of fractal events, there is no reason to suppose these conditions
have been repeated elsewhere.  There y'go… that's life!

RECOMMENDED READING
Steven J Dick, The Biological Universe (1996)
Stuart Ross Taylor, Solar System Evolution: A New Perspective (1992)

RECOMMENDED SURFING
< http://astro.ph.unimelb.edu.au/central/home.html >
'Melbourne Astronomy Central'

< http://garber.simplenet.com/ >
Darren D Garber's 'Other Worlds, Distant Suns'

SPECIAL THANKS TO
Professor Mark Bailey, Janet Bord, Jerome Clark, Chris Fluke, Darren D
Garber, Brett Holman, Rosalind Hopkinson, Jeff King, Ian Ridpath, Lesley
Riley, and Peter Rogerson for material help (some of it inadvertent) and
advice in preparing these articles.  All the errors are my own.

An unabridged version, with full annotation, will be posted on FT Online
after the series has been published.

NOTES
1. Michael D Swords, 'Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and Science', in Jerome
Clark (ed.): The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition (Omnigraphics, 1998, pp.368-73).

2. See Ken Croswell, Planet Quest (Oxford UP, 1997) for a fascinating and
accessible account of planet hunting.

3. Quoted in Kathy Sawyer, 'Jumping Jupiter! Is Our Solar System A Rarity?',
Washington Post (15 Feb 1999, p. A3).

4. Glenn Giffen, 'Carl Sagan's world revolves around nothing but the proof',
Denver Post (10 March 1996, p. E-01).

5. Quoted in Jeff Hecht, 'Apocalypse Postponed', New Scientist (21 March 1998).

6. Mike Davis, 'Cosmic Dancers on History's Stage?', The Anomalist no.5
(Summer 1997, p.113).  This stunning essay (first published in New Left Review
No. 217) is essential reading for anyone interested in the ETH debate.  The
quotations from Ursula Marvin, Herbert Shaw, and Stuart Ross Taylor are
taken from this article.

7. Peter J Smith, 'Bang, You're Dead', New Scientist (19 Sept 1998).

8. See, for example, George Wetherill, 'Possible consequences of absence of
Jupiter's in planetary systems', Astrophys Space Sci no.212 (1994, pp.23-32);
and George Wetherill, 'How Special is Jupiter?' Nature no.373 (1995, p.470).

9. "So far as the evolution of life is concerned… were it not for Jupiter, we
would effectively be living in a 'permanent' comet shower, with a cometary
impact flux possibly thousands of times greater than that currently experienced.
This would indeed be a significant brake on the development of complex life
forms,
let alone civilization."  - Professor Mark Bailey, Armagh Observatory (private
communication to the author, 16 February 1999).

Of relevance to my later argument here, he added that "one of the main
characteristics of 'complex' life forms appears to be their relative
susceptibility
to major external perturbations, evidenced by the observed mass extinctions of
life which occur roughly every 30 Myr throughout the geological record.  Were
impacts to happen with anything like the intensity of a comet shower, it would
appear highly unlikely that very complex animals cold ever have developed, let
alone the prospect (as we now have) for an advanced civilization. 
Civilisations,
of course, are even more fragile, and highly susceptible to the effects of even
quite small impacts."

10. See Isaac Asimov, Asimov's New Guide to Science [1984](Penguin 1987, p.603).

11. This is supremely ironic, not least because what is now the Moon was flung
from
the Earth about 4 billion years ago in a fundamental fender-bender initiated by
a
wandering object the size of Mars.  This idea (which astronomers call the 'Big
Splash') has been about since 1946, and accepted b y scientists since the mid
1970s.
Cf: John & Mary Gribbin, 'Bolts from the Blue', Inside Science no.113 (12 Sept
1998,
p. 3).  Findings from NASA's Lunar Prospector mission have confirmed the
hypothesis;
it was announced in March 1999 (Reuters).

12. This capability and its realisation was not foreshadowed or inexorable, as
Swords thinks.  See, for example, his erroneous treatment of this very question
in Bill Fawcett (ed.), Making Contact (Wm. Morrow, 1997, p.181).  And Michael
Sword's account of the evolution of fins in fishes in his JUFOS article
(pp.84-5)
too is, to put it kindly, idiosyncratic.

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
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Fortean Times 135, July 2000, pp 30-33

Elephants on Mars, Part Two

nothing succeeds as PLANNED

Peter Brookesmith continues his critique of the idea that the evolution
of intelligent life on other planets will, inevitably, follow a similar path
as on Earth.  The latest scientific thinking, he says, calls into question
the evolutionary value of 'intelligence' and our understanding of the
nature of 'progress'.

Let's suppose - for the sake of the argument - that, out there, somewhere,
is a planet where life not only springs into being, but whose circumstances
encourage evolution.  What happens next?  Professor Michael Swords is
happy to be guided by what has happened on Earth.  In his sunny account:
"Once life forms on a world [..] almost no-one believes in anything other than
a continued advance in complexity. [..]  If given enough time and evolutionary
runs at it, not only advancement but high intelligence should result.
(Intelligence is one of the most powerful survival characteristics in the
struggle for existence.)  Any world circling a Sun-like star, with enough time
in the habitable zone, should develop advanced intelligence, and if the
habitat is terrestrial (rather than aquatic), that intelligence should
flourish into a materials-manipulating technical civilization."(15)

In actuality, almost no-one of any scientific credibility believes any
such thing, although many others may hope so.  Virtually every sentence
of Swords' here is either tendentious or just plain wrong.  As in his
outline of planetary formation - see last issue - Swords' argument
rests on a startlingly out-dated account of the way evolutionists think
today.  Just as planetologists have conceded that chance and chaos play
a key role in the formulation of solar systems, so neo-Darwinists have
had to acknowledge the crucial parts played in the evolution of life by
contingency and catastrophe.  This has not been such an enormous shift
in principle, as one might suppose, because the 'theory of evolution' equals
progress.  Darwin himself (left) simply regarded it as "a theory of
descent with modification."

However, Swords and many others have equated evolution with 'progress,'
by which they mean greater complexity of biological and, in particular,
neurological organisation.  By extension - as Swords' proclamations
illustrate - this interpretation implies that evolution will perforce produce
some intelligent, self-conscious life-form that is capable of symbolic
thought, language and, hence, the manipulation of materials and the
environment.

This is not how even an 'ultra-Darwinist'(16) like Professor Richard Dawkins
would use the term 'progress.'  In a 1993 article, Dawkins - whose
deterministic philosophy of evolution (or anything else) is not endorsed
by this writer - clarified what he meant: "We can define evolutionary
progress either in a value-laden or a value-neutral way - ie either with
or without building in notions of what is good or bad.  A value-laden
definition specifies whether the factor being monitored, be it brain
size, intelligence, artistic ability, physical strength or whatever, is
desirable or undesirable.  If a desirable factor increases, that is
progress.  But on a value-neutral definition, [..] the factor which we
discover to be 'progressive' could be something which we regard as bad -
say, idleness or stupidity.  In this value-neutral sense, a continued
trend towards decreased brain size would be progressive, just as much
as a trend towards increased brain size would be.  The only thing that
would not be progressive would be a reversal of the trend."(17)

Dawkins here echoes, as he ought, Darwin's own thinking.  In 1872
Darwin wrote to the Harvard paleontologist Alpheus Hyatt: "I cannot
avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive
development exists."  In a marginal note elsewhere he jotted:
"Never say higher or lower."(18)  So, when Swords declares:
"Intelligence is one of the most powerful survival characteristics in
the struggle for existence," one is obliged to ask what in the world
justifies his faith.

If intelligence means self-consciousness and the capacity for symbolic
thought, we find ourselves reflecting that this form of intelligence has
evolved precisely once in 3.5 billion years of life on Earth - that is in
the form of Homo sapiens, among the millions of perfectly well-adapted
and successfully surviving species of animal on the planet.  And if
intelligence means no more than the capacity to learn from experience,
then we find ourselves asking how it is that bacteria, viruses,
zooplankton and other mindless creatures have survived so well -
probably from the very first days of life on Earth.  They are the
most successful, in Darwinian terms, of all creatures, even while
sturdily remaining the least 'intelligent.'

Darwin had no scientific faith in an "innate tendency to progressive
development" in biological evolution.  Yet he withheld his revolutionary
theory from publication for more than 20 years, fearing that (in Prof.
John Carey's words) "the blow to Christianity and to the dignity of man
inherent in such a theory would [..] encourage atheistic agitators and
socialist revolutionaries."(19)  A conflict between Darwin's radical thought
and his material circumstances explains why, at the very end of _Origin
of Species_, he confusingly ceded ground to the notion of 'progress' in
evolution.  Darwin - a revolutionary scientist but also a deeply
conservative Victorian squire - lived in a paternalistic society infested
with the idea of 'progress'; simply, he was unable to betray the
central premise of his age.

The crucial issue is that his "argument for complexity" had nothing
to do with his scientific thinking or his observation of nature.(20)
Nonetheless, the idea took hold among biologists that evolution is a
process toward something - Darwin called it "perfection."  But in
parallel with the emerging holistic tendency in planetary and
geological studies, a new generation of evolutionists has questioned
the truth of the shibboleth of evolutionary 'progress,' and has found
it wanting.

The standard illustration of the received, if erroneous, wisdom has long
been the alleged development of the horse.  As late as the 1970s, even
the educationally reformist Nuffield Foundation's biology texts for O
Level students were maintaining a traditional, and misleading, picture
of this evolution as a straight line from ancient to modern exemplars.(21)

The modern horse, Equus caballus, which emerged in the New World
about 2 million years ago (Mya), is a single-toed ungulate mammal,
standing as high as 18 hands (6ft or 1.83m) at the shoulder, with
high-crowned grazer's teeth and a digestive system superbly adapted
to extract energy from the least nourishing, silica-rich grasses.  The
earliest true horse was Eohippus (dawn horse) or more correctly between
Hyracotherium.  It emerged about 55 Mya, stood between 10-20in
(25-50cm) at the shoulder, had three toes on its hind feet and four on
its forefeet, and had the low-crowned, grinding teeth typical of an
omnivorous browser (leaf eater).

Were one to trace an evolutionary line from modern Equus back to
Hyracotherium one would indeed uncover a tale of increasingly subtle
adaptation to changing circumstances, and one would get the
impression that the horse had 'improved' and 'progressed' as it
evolved from the 'dawn horse' through Orohippus, Mesohippus,
Merychippus and so on to next year's Derby winner.  But evolution
doesn't work backwards, and it certainly doesn't flow in straight lines.
Reduced to genera, the story of the horse actually looks like the tree
set out in our main diagram (below left).

(Note: "L" = line)
2My       Old & New World Equus
                    L    L    L
                    L    L    L
4My Hippidion         Equus                                         
Stylohipparion
         L               L   Astrohippus    Neohipparion Hipparion
Cormohipparion
         L               L   Pliohippus            L             L            L
12My Dinohippus           Calippus                        L   L   L
         L                       L       Pseudipparion      L   L   L
         L    L    L   L   L    L   L     L    L    L   L  L    L   L   
Sinohippus
15My                   L   L   L                                               L
                         L   L   L                            Megahippus       L
17My                  Merychippus                               L            L
                             L               Anchitherium         Hypohippus
                             L                     L                L
23My                   Parahippus               Anchitherium  L          
Archeohippus
                             L                            
L                           L
25My                [Kalobatippus?] L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L  
L
                                       L  L  L
                                       L  L  L
                                          L
35My                               Miohippus   Mesohippus
                                          L           L
40My                                     Mesohippus
                                                L
                                                L
45My                Paleotherium            L
                            L                  Epihippus
                            L                      L
                   Propalaeotherium             L     Haplohippus
                            L                      L           L
50My     Pachynolophus  L                      Orohippus L
                 L          L                           L
                 L          L                           L
                 L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L   L
                                    L   L   L
                                     L   L   L
55My                          Hyracotherium [Note: = Eohippus]

HORSE WHISPERS:  The evolution of the horse is not as clear cut as
Darwinists would have us believe.

The first thing to note is the patent lack of a 'main line' of equine
evolution, along which the horse 'improves' as times goes by; the route
from Hyracotherium to Equus is a series of sidetracks, most of which
eventually reach dead ends.  As Kathleen Hunt notes: "Our familiar
Equus is merely one twig on a once-flourishing bush of equine species.
We only have the illusion of straight-line evolution because Equus is
the only twig that survived."(22)

But the dead twigs were not 'failed experiments' struggling toward
some evolutionary triumph; they were successful in their own right.
At one point, a little over 13.5 Mya, there were at least 19 thriving
species of equids, and they were highly successful for millions of years.
Kathleen Hunt comments that: "horse evolution was not smooth and
gradual.  Different traits evolved at different rates, didn't always
come into being by gradual transformation ('anagenesis') of their
ancestors; instead, sometimes new species 'split off' from ancestors
('cladogenesis') and then co-existed with those ancestors for some
time.  Some species arose gradually, others suddenly."

Any one of these given different circumstances, might have survived,
or developed in their own way, along with modern Equus, into the present.

But they did not.  The second notable point, then, is how many species
of equids did not survive, either at any particular point in the last 55
million years, or into the present.  There is no reason to suppose that
Equus caballus is here today except by chance; a chance which could
have favoured any other descendant of Merychippus or even Mesohippus.
In other words, there is nothing in the fossil record - or in logic - to
suggest that the modern horse is the inevitable consequence of
Hyracotherium.  To put it still more bluntly, one could not predict the
emergence, let alone the survival, of modern Equus from the original
dawn horse.

The only other way to 'explain" the persistence of Equus - and whip up an
unstoppable evolutionary gallop from 55 Mya to the whinnying present - is
to invoke the name of God… who, we all know, wouldn't have invented horses
if he hadn't wanted us to lose our shirts on the Grand National.

Yet by any objective evolutionary yardstick the modern horse has not been
a terribly successful species, from no fault of its own.  Stephen Budiansky
relates that Equus - the sole survivor of 55 million years of speciation -
had become extinct in the Americas by 10,000 years ago at latest, and
survived increasingly tenuously in Asia as once plentiful grazing lands
disappeared under encroaching forest.  The horse did not evolve to cope
with that change.  By the Fourth(4th) millennium BC, the Asian herds had
dwindled to perhaps only a few hundred animals.  The reason there are
60 million horses in the world today is that, around 6,000 years ago, a
tribe in what is now the Ukraine domesticated them, ate them, and
learned to ride them.  In light of all this, it is not surprising that one
chapter of Budiansky's astonishing books is titled 'The Improbability of
the Horse.'(23)

By now it should be plain that the foundation for Michael Swords' claim
that the Universe is "brimming with ETI" (extraterrestrial intelligence)
is as vacuous as his picture of evolution as an 'continued advance' toward
complexity and intelligence is fatuous.

The point should be made on a larger scale: for, after all, the 'dawn
horse' was already an extremely complex animal when it began its
erratic course toward today's domestic Neddy.  Indeed, in terms of
adaptation to its environment or its general anatomical and neurological
organisation, Hyracotherium was hardly less complex (if markedly smaller)
than modern Equus.  'Progress', then, exists only in the eye of the
beholder.

As Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard University, notes, many animals have
responded to evolutionary pressures - which arise only from "immediately
surrounding (and changing) environments" - by decreasing in complexity.
For instance: "As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle
by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached
to the underbelly of its crab host (with 'roots' of equally formless
tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself) - a devilish device
to be sure [..] but surely less anatomically complex than the barnacle
on the bottom of your boat."(24)

Gould bolsters his argument against an evolutionary drive toward greater
complexity with detailed summaries of other scientists' research into
mammalian and ammonite evolution, which found no such trend - in fact
they found a slight overall tendency toward simplification.  Gould says:
"Under the traditional model of evolutionary history [..] life moves ever
upward to greater progress, and outward to a larger number of species.
[..] But [..] an inverted iconography may be more appropriate - with
maximal anatomical range of disparity reached early in life's history,
followed by the extinction of most initial experiments and the settling
down of life's diversity to just a few of the original possibilities."(25)

Gould then refers to conclusions from modern studies of the Burgess
Shale fossils.  "Since our own lineage of vertebrates held a tenuous
position among these initial experiments - with only two early Cambrian
precursors known as fossils, Pikaia [above] from the Burgess Shale, and
Yunnanozoon recently described from Chengjiang in China - we must
assume that most replays [of the lottery of evolution] would not include
the survival and flourishing of vertebrates.  All of us - from sharks to
rhinos to humans - would then have been excluded from the history
of life."(26)

Once again, it should be stressed that this view of the principles of
evolution is not some whimsy of the fringe.  Sue Bowler, editor of the
academic journal Astronomy and Geophysics, has noted that the
re-evaluation of the Burgess Shale fossils "changed the face of
modern paleontology and evolutionary biology."  Even Richard Dawkins -
Gould's archenemy on matters of punctuated equilibrium and contingency -
is careful to deny that genes have any sense of purpose in driving the
evolution of complex creatures.  Dawkins insists on "differential
probabilities of survival" and like concepts.  If Dawkins and Gould
are representatives of important disputes in mainstream evolutionism,
the discipline's drift is still in profound contradiction to Swords' thinking.

To bring all this back home to the question of extraterrestrial life and
the dominance of microbial life on our planet, we might note the work of
bacteriologist Thomas Gold of Cornell University.  In 1992, Gold
summarised the case for huge numbers of bacteria living within rather
than just on, the Earth's crust.  He calculated that there were
possibly 2 X 1,014 tonnes of subterranean bacteria - enough to make
a layer 1.5m (5ft) deep if laid on the Earth's land surface and far
outweighing all other forms of life on Earth: "The surface life on the
Earth, based on photosynthesis for its overall energy supply, may just
be one strange branch of life, an adaptation specific to a planet that
happened to have such favourable circumstances on its surface as
would occur only very rarely. [..] The deep chemically supplied life,
however, may be very common in the Universe."(27)

Extraterrestrial life, in short, may be nothing at all unusual.  But
extraterrestrial intelligence - let alone one with the capacity to
sidestep the laws of nature (as abductologists would have us believe)
and that just happened to look like a malnourished pasty-faced dwarf
with galloping glaucoma - begins to look as if it may be exceedingly rare.

RESOURCES

RECOMMENDED READING
The Deep, Hot Biosphere Thomas Gold (1998)
Rare Earth Peter D Ward & Donald Brownlee (2000)

RECOMMENDED SURFING
< http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/bshale/ >
Burgess Shale online exhibit

< http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/ >
Thomas Gold homepage

NOTES
15. Michael D. Swords, 'Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and Science', in
Jerome Clark (ed.): The UFO Encyclopedia, Second Edition (Omnigraphics,
1998, pp.368-373).
16. The term is Prof. Steven Rose's: see _Lifelines: Biology, Freedom,
Determination_ (1997, pp.ix-xiii).  Rose powerfully opposes Prof. Richard
Dawkins's deterministic concept of the 'selfish gene,' but also makes fair
criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould's concepts of punctuated equilibrium and
'contingency' (see pp.221-5, and 230-244).
17. Richard Dawkins, 'The evolutionary future of man: A biological view of
progress', The Economist (11 Sept 1993, p.87).
18. Both quotations are from Stephen Jay Gould, in Life's Grandeur (UK:
Jonathan Cape, 1996; US title: Full House, Harmony, 1996; p.137).
19. John Carey (ed), 'The Devil's Chaplain', The Faber Book of Science
(Faber & Faber, 1995, p.114).  It has even been speculated that Darwin's
famous ill health derived from this internal conflict: cf., for instance,
Encyclopedia Britannica CD99's biographical entry: "The conflict between
[Darwin's] science and his realization of what publication would imply for
the society he was so much a part of manifested itself in physical pain.
The once adventurous young naturalist was a semi-invalid before his
fortieth year."
20. Cf Gould, op. cit.,pp.135-146.
21. See Grace Monger (ed.), The Perpetuation of Life, Revised
(Nuffield Biology Text 4, Longman, 1975, pp.224-5). In fairness it
should be said that later Nuffield biology texts have avoided perpetuating
this mythic version of events.
22. Kathleen Hunt, 'Horse Evolution' (1995):
< http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses.html >
23. See Stephen Budiansky: The Nature of Horses (Phoenix, 1997,p.33-50).
24. Gould: op. cit., p.139.  In his essay 'Triumph of the Root-Heads',
Gould retracts this comment somewhat in light of the subtle and complex
life-cycle of this extraordinary parasite.  See _Leonardo's Mountain of
Clams and the Diet of Worms_ (Cape, 1998, pp.355-76).
25. See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (Penguin, 1991), for a full
discussion of the implications of modern scholarship and research on the
Burgess fossils.
26. Gould, Life's Grandeur, p.215.
27. Thomas Gold, 'The deep, hot biosphere', _Proceedings of the National
of Sciences USA_ [sic], no.89 (1992, pp.6045-9).  Gold has now turned his
findings and theory into a book: The Deep Hot Biosphere (Copernicus, 1998).

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: Fortean Times * Northwest Mysteries * Mystic's Cyberpage *
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