 |
|
 |
|
Why you look like an alien, or vice versa! |
 Hello again, more textual anomalies for your perusal. What will I be talking about today? Hmmm...
Convergence! (oh no, science stuff!) . What is convergence? Well it's many things, and usually means something along the lines of things coming together. What I would like to talk about very briefly is evolutionary convergence. (oh no evolution stuff!). Panic not, this hopefully will make you think about these little grey fellas reported during UFO abductions.
Ok, studies of evolution have proposed a theory of convergence. What this means is that evolution, despite creating many sorts of types of creature, usually comes to the same "answer" when evolving common things. Take the eye for example, there are many, many different eyes on different creatures, but they all basically work the same way. Capture light, put it on some kind of surface and feed those signals to the brain. Why would we have roughly the same eye design as an octopus? Plus Using the same chemicals to create the eye, and the same basic structure? Wherever you look (excuse the pun) you'll see that they are really only variants on the same solution. Or take wings, lots of different designs, but really the same idea behind them all.Incidentally, getting back to eyes, did you ever think that we see nothing without a lens being in the way. Microscopes, telescopes and our own eyes all uses lenses, not important, just an interesting aside.
THe idea therefore, is that the same results occur in a myriad of different creatures, almost as if this were a common solution being put into practice. Nothing really seems to re-invent the wheel as it were. Now, if you consider that evolution as a principle, may occur elsewhere in the universe, does that mean that any creatures we find elsewhere would look completely bizarre?
Well, firstly they'd have to be pretty bizarre to compete with some of the animal weirdos on this planet. I mean, duck billed platypus ? What's that all about ? Interestingly enough, when they were first discussed, some of those scientists refused to believe they existed, and had to be shown live specimens. Anyway, I'm getting off the point here. The point is, that most evolutionary biologists support the idea of evolution as a universal constant, given studies of millions of creatures here. What some of them are now saying is that life on other planets would indeed look different from life here, BUT the same convergent principles would occur. So that chances are whatever creatures you found, would probably have eyes, some may have wings etc. So much depends on the planet and it's atmosphere of course.
Taking this a step further, they see the development of primate type creatures as inevitable if another planet had a similar set up to our own. They see this, because of the efficiency showed in those species, which has developed from something extremely lower than itself. One of these scientists recently said that it is entirely feasible if similar to our origns with primates, there'd be no good reason why primate type creatures on another planet wouldn't then develop into something like us. In his words, that creature would look "eerily like us". So now you can picture the descriptions of the alien greys.
www.youtube.com/watch
That is of course unless those guys are ourselves travelling back from the future lol.
Anyway, I'm sure I've oversimplified matters here, if anyone is interested I'll give more detail. The point I really wanted to make is that it is no longer an issue if reported aliens look like us. For several decades now the loud comments from debunkers was that aliens, if visiting this planet from elsewhere, would look "nothing at all like us" and the fact that they do, proves it's just a fantasy, or made up. Now I'm afraid that isn't the case. Sure there are a lot of "ifs" and "buts" in the hypothesised theory of evolution, here and elsewhere, but the bottom line is this is how some biologists, and exobiologists are now thinking.
Having said all of that, doesn't prove that actual aliens are coming here from a distant solar system. Aliens may not be so alien after all, and could have their origins much closer to home (future article).
I'll make that it, for todays little textual adventure. As usual feel free to comment or, heaven forbid you could have your own little area on this front page! Details of which can be found following the link below.
www.book-of-thoth.com/ftopict-20769.html
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| Why you look like an alien, or vice versa! | Login/Create an Account | 0 comments | | The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Resources
Audio/Visual
Discussion & Chat
Information
Keep Up To Date
Fun & Games
Submitting
Spread The Word
Rules & Help
Personal
