Simon Conway Morris: "Aliens are likely to look and behave like us".

I'm going to come out and say it: this guy is an idiot. He plausibly has some narrow domain expertise in paleontology, but outside of that, he has no clue what he's talking about. Even on Earth, the most intelligent species are dolphins, crows and chimpanzees (including us); any alien intelligence is going to be more different from you than you are from a dolphin or bird. Star Trek aliens ("rubber forehead aliens") are more similar to us than we are to chimps; to call that "unrealistic" is a huge understatement. And, searching for water? Really? Water is composed of two elements: hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, and oxygen is the third most abundant (after hydrogen and helium). A shortage of water is about the last problem an intergalactic civilization is going to have.

Why is this folly worthy of our notice?

Thoughts on this?

Conway Morris has become attached to "convergent evolution" as a mechanism by which import his personal brand of theism back into science. Whilst I have no guarantee that he'll say the same things, here he seems to reveal his personal opinions. TL;DR is that evolution is predictable by convergence, add mind and recover god...

Given that his early work was on the Cambrian explosion, you'd expect that he have more of a clue than to assert that they will have evolved "just like us". I'd suggest this is an instance of a scientist compartmentalising his map, and distorting it with desiderata other that truth.

This is the conference. Found it through the guardian article.

Off the cuff thoughts. I see no reason at all why they couldn't have four legs and two arms. That is quadrapeds seem like a choice baked in early. I can see why intelligent aquatic life might have a harder time forming heavy industry due to lack of oxygen, but I don't think it is impossible that there are sentient squid out there. I'll read some more.

ETA: In a way it doesn't matter what the aliens originally looked like, I doubt we will see squid in a can coming our way for much the same reason that monkey in a can doesn't seem realistic. The TL;DR of that link is that to create a living self-sustaining biosystem requires too much mass and complexity, and having ultra advanced technology implies a singularity/uploads type scenario, so we wouldn't see their original bodies.

As to psychology, all bets are off if they have done significant self-modification.

I don't see why darwinian evolution would necessarily create humanoid aliens in other environments-- sure arguing that they are likely to have structures similar to eyes to take advantage of EM waves makes sense, and even arguing that they'll have a structure similar to a head where a centralized sensory-decision-making unit like a brain exists makes sense, but walking on two legs? Even looking at the more intelligent life-forms on our own planet we find a great diversity of structure: from apes to dolphins to elephants to octopi... All I'd say we can really gather from this argument is that aliens will look like creatures and not like flickering light rays or crystals or something incomprehensibly foreign.

I predict that any intelligent species decended from apes or apelike animals will greatly resemble us.

Ones decended from proto-octopi will look different.

I'm not sure he's only slightly woo. Just because he's not a typical creationist doesn't mean he's not more woo. If he's got a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, then all his evolution talk is just science themed woo.

Also: He's saying they'll look like us if they're out there, but it looks like they're not out there. This seems like he's making a prediction that's exactly as precise as he thinks it's unfalsifiable.

Because we have a sample size of life of 1, and sample size of intelligent life of 1, we have very little way of figuring out what would the second sample look like.

One thing I'd be willing to bet on is that it will be based on CHONPS chemistry like us.

“It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian,"

In that respect, I'd say he's right. I think Dawkins has said the same thing, in fact. But you're right that there's no reason to expect that any extraterrestrial life would look more like us than our most distant earthly relatives.

Depending on precisely what type of theist he is, his observations need be taken with an additional grain, or perhaps heaping tablespoon, of salt.

If he's even roughly Christian, ET life poses extraordinary problems, namely, if God created other sentient life, then we aren't special, like the bible says, and the bible is missing some rather large facts that are particularly difficult to explain the absence of. The only way to "solve" this is if there is no ET life (which may be why he says "it is increasingly looking like" despite our incredibly limited search capacity) or that it looks a whole lot like us. The latter would solve the problem because something that looked like us could still have been created "in the image of God." In a (purely) superficial way, rubber forehead aliens pose a smaller threat to the Bible than starfish aliens.

That's my best explanation for how someone ends up with the conclusion that a process occurring on an unknown world with an unknown atmosphere, unknown environment, unknown self-replicating molecules, unknown chemistry, unknown gravity, unknown methods of reproduction, unknown selective pressures, and unknown unknowns ends up looking like something that could seduce a young William Shatner. The only other explanation that occurs to me is that he just came to a conclusion early on and doesn't feel like honestly reconsidering it.

His argument is based on the idea that organisms evolve to fill some niche in an ecosystem, and that different ecosystems may develop niches that require similar characteristics. E.g. a "carnivore" niche may call for organisms with sharp teeth, fast movements, etc, and we should be unsurprised when we find that independently evolved carnivores on different continents on Earth all exhibit these same characteristics. He points out examples of independently evolved organisms that have ended up very similar due to this phenomenon (I think sabre tooth tigers and a particular ecosystem of rainforrest frogs were among his examples).

Morris posits humans as filling the "intelligent" niche, which he would claim requires many of the characteristics we exhibit, so he would say that if we "ran evolution a second time" then we may again end up with intelligent bipedal creatures not unlike humans.

Is this just an instance of a slightly woo scientist-theist failing to take into account that nature might be more imaginative than him?

The stuff you quoted has all the ear-marks of generalizing from one example. Your quip about nature being imaginative reminds me of Think Like Reality.

Personally, I know nothing of the subjects behind the statements. It just sounds like really restrictive statements about something that seems impossible to verify at this point in history.

This seems like a very limited, anthropogenic view of things. Because Prof. Conway can't imagine life evolving on a planet much different than our own, and he can't imagine intelligent life evolving out of a different niche as ourselves, he concludes that it is necessary for alien life to resemble ourselves.

How very Twilight-Zone like thinking.

Along these lines, has any scientists attempted running evolutionary algorithms to see if we can simulate approximations of spontaneous evolution of human-like life forms?

What are his arguments - against materialism? It seems to have something to do with the afterlife:

"This may be a distortion of the time in which we fortuitously find ourselves; what was rare in the last four thousand million years of evolutionary history might be common in the next four thousand million years. Weak support for this argument might come from the most closely related species to us, the Neandertals. Perhaps independently they developed some sort of sense of an afterlife, at least to judge from their practice of deliberate burial. Materialists will scoff at this as a shared delusion, but there are metaphysical alternatives that are perhaps more fruitful."

• The Crucible of Creation, p. 6.

I am absolutely willing to accept that there is life out there in the universe that looks like us, or the aliens James Cameron made up for the movie Pandora. However, it seems unlikely that most life in the universe is like us. We could quickly contrast with the similarly dumbed down press piece about the possibility of non-human like aliens. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527441.400-the-face-of-first-contact-what-aliens-look-like.html

As a more rigorous counter-example, here is a relatively rigorous description of inorganic life:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.htm (not very good popular summary)

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i6/e066408 (2004 abstract, talks about plasma clouds with dust boundaries)

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1063-7869/50/4/R11/ (2007 abstract)

I wonder if a living plasma dust cloud could evolve the ability to communicate with a probe sent by transhumans. I'd put the odds above 1%.

If anyone has access to the papers, please email them to me or upload them on Scribd. The main idea I want to understand is what "Self-organizing structures are frequently seen both in laboratory and natural conditions" means, especially with regards to natural conditions and if the scientists have any probability estimates for how common helical growing plasma dust clouds are in the universe.