Our alien ancestors

A friend and long-time faithful reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a few days ago to a webpage entitled, "Expert Says Humans Are Aliens -- and We Were Brought to Earth Hundreds of Thousands of Years Ago."

Now, I hasten to state for the record that this friend didn't send me this because she believes it; she clearly sent me this so I would do a faceplant on my desk so hard that it would leave a comical impression of my computer keyboard on my forehead for the rest of the day.  But I have to admit it starts out with a good question, to wit: "What if Humans are the aliens we've been looking for all along?"

To which I would answer: "What if C-A-T spelled 'dog'?"  Even if you were to entertain seriously the possibility that the ancestors of today's humans were dropped off here from another planet, which I am not for a moment suggesting you should, there's the pesky little problem of human DNA showing 70-80% homology with that of other mammal species, presuming of course that those species didn't come from other planets, too.

I mean, I'm a little suspicious about platypuses, myself, because it's hard to imagine how evolution would produce something so completely ridiculous looking.  It's not so hard to believe that aliens deposited platypuses in Australia as some kind of bizarre prank, and we humans just haven't gotten the joke yet.

But I digress.

So we're off to a rocky start, but it gets worse.  The author goes on to describe how the development of written communication is an indication that we're different from other species, and the only possible reason for this is that we're aliens.  But the problem is that you can do this with damn near any species on Earth.  For example: the archer fish of Southeast Asia has evolved the ability to spit water at insects on overhanging leaves and branches, to knock them into the water, whereupon the archer fish has dinner.  To my knowledge, no other animal can do this.

Does this mean the archer fish is also an alien?

Argument #2 goes something like, "Humans can't be evolved from other terrestrial life forms, because if you took a typical human and put him/her in the jungle, in short order (s)he would become jaguar chow, if (s)he didn't starve to death first."  But again, consider other earthly species; of course if you stick some unlucky individual into an environment that's hostile, or radically different from where it evolved, it's gonna die.  I'm guessing if you took a spider monkey and put it on the coast of Greenland, you would very quickly have a monkeysicle.  But that doesn't mean that monkeys aren't from the Planet Earth; it just means they're not from Greenland.

Oh, and then there's the argument that since we can't look at the sun directly without hurting our eyes, we must be from a planet where the sun is dimmer, or it's cloudy all the time.

For fuck's sake.

A photograph of my Cousin Fred, taken at last year's family reunion on the planet Gzork.  I told him to smile, but this is the best he could do.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the "expert" gets on board, in the person of Dr. Ellis Silver, who has written a book called Humans Are Not From Earth: A Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence.  The first thing I did was to look up Dr. Silver's book on Amazon, and I found it had received 115 reviews, which follow the usual horseshoe-shaped distribution typical of wacko ideas; lots of 5s, lots of 1s, and not a hell of a lot in between.  In other words, either you're a true believer or a doubter right from the outset, and the book itself didn't make any difference to either group.  Here is a sampler of the reviews:

• [T]here is not a shred of logic, science, empricism, or plausibility in this book.  It is SO bad that I'm almost inclined to think it's a hoax.
• This author seems to have no understanding of either evolution or the scientific method.  On the bright side, whenever I go outside now and find myself squinting at the sun, I take comfort in the notion that on my home planet it's always cloudy.
• If you're thinking of buying this book save yourself the time and money and don't.  More evidence to support my opinion: study the book cover for a few moments and tell me it wasn't made up in MS Paint in 2 minutes.
• The author really should take a couple anthropology classes at a community college.

So not exactly ringing endorsements.  The author then goes on to cite a different "expert," one Robert Sepehr, who has written his own book (of course), this one called Species With Amnesia: Our Forbidden History.  So of course I had to check that one out.  The basic idea here is apparently that the Rh-negative blood type allele is weird, therefore we have to be the descendants of technologically advanced aliens who have forgotten where we came from and are now in the process of reinventing everything our ancestors knew.  Which, I think we can all agree, is what lawyers call an "air-tight argument."

Only one review for Sepehr's book stood out:

• [T]his author is obviously creating multiple Amazon accounts to leave favorable rankings and reviews on his books.  Click on the hyperlinks of the names of the people leaving five star reviews; all of them have left reviews on Sepehr's books only, all 5-star, and most left on the same day!  The author's credentials seem nonexistent, and with 5 minutes of research I could plainly see that the majority of praise for his work online is fake.

So there's that.

On the other hand, my mother was Rh-negative, meaning she has not just one, but two Rh-negative alleles, so she's alien on both sides of her family.

Which, now that I think about it, explains a great deal about my mother's relatives.

In any case, the whole thing seems to be a non-starter, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love nothing better than to discover that I'm an alien, especially if it meant that at some point my extraterrestrial cousins would whoosh down on their hyper-light-speed spaceship and pick me up to return to our home world, light years away from Donald Trump.  But I suppose that's too much to hope for, even if I do have at least some Rh-negative alien DNA.

Aliens in the family tree

A frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago with the note, "More grist for your mill."  As soon as I looked at the website address, I knew it was gonna be good, for two reasons.

The first is that the link was from The Daily Mail, a "news" source so sensationalized and tripe-filled that a lot of people call it The Daily Fail.  It seems to have replaced The National Enquirer as the go-to spot for information about celebrities, political sex scandals, and UFO sightings.

The second was that the title of the article was, "Humans Do NOT Come From Earth."

Upon opening the link, we find that a gentleman named Ellis Silver has written a book, coincidentally given the same title as the article.  Silver himself is a Ph.D.  How do I know?  Because on his book cover, which shows a picture of the Earth with Photoshopped black alien eyes, he calls himself "Ellis Silver Ph.D."

I'm always a bit put off when people do this.  It's a bit of a recursive appeal to authority.  My feeling is that if your ideas stood on their own merits, you wouldn't need to brag about your degree -- and that if what you're saying is ridiculous, the fact that you have a degree doesn't somehow make it sensible.  I wasn't able to find where his degree was from, but most of the sites that mention him call him "an American ecologist," so I suppose that must be what his doctorate is in.

Be that as it may, the review in The Daily Mail begins thusly:

A U.S. ecologist has claimed that humans are not from Earth but were put on the planet by aliens tens of thousands of years ago.

Dr Ellis Silver points to a number of physiological features to make his case for why humans did not evolve alongside other life on Earth, in his new book.

They range from humans suffering from bad backs - which he suggests is because we evolved in a world with lower gravity – to getting too easily sunburned and having difficulty giving birth.

Dr Ellis says that while the planet meets humans’ needs for the most part, it does not perhaps serve the species’ interests as well as the aliens who dropped us off imagined.

Well, this tells me two things right off: (1) Silver doesn't understand how evolution works; and (2) he hasn't spent much time looking at the problems other animals have.

Evolution is, at its heart, the law of "whatever works."  The fact that we are the only primate species that stands upright for long periods is what has resulted in our lower back problems -- our spines, which have the characteristic gentle s-bend in the middle, are a brilliant way to carry weight if you support yourself on your knuckles, but don't work so well if you are standing up.  (When was the last time you saw a front porch supported by a curved pillar?)  But the problems such a design engenders were, apparently, outweighed by the advantages conferred to our distant ancestors -- seeing further over tall grass and leaving our hands free to manipulate tools being two probable ones.

Secondly, we are hardly the only species that has trouble managing the vagaries of its environment.  Every species has traits that can backfire, or work well in some contexts and not so well in others.  Even the lowly brine shrimp of Great Salt Lake die by the millions of osmotic shock every time there's a sudden snow melt and subsequent influx of fresh water.

Maladaptive traits can exist for a variety of reasons.  One possibility is that they once were beneficial, but aren't any longer because circumstances changed -- a so-called "evolutionary misfire," like moths and other insects circling around light bulbs and ultimately getting fried.  (This behavior apparently originates from insects using distant light sources to navigate at night, and that strategy being confounded by nearby light sources.)  Others, like the peacock's unwieldy and cumbersome tail, probably evolved because of sexual selection pushing a trait to the point that it becomes a hindrance.  Still others crop up because of pleiotropy -- the fact that a single gene can have several different phenotypic manifestations, each carrying their own advantages and disadvantages.  The gene that causes seal-point coat color in Siamese cats, for example, can result in their having crossed eyes.

But Dr. Silver discounts all of the hundreds of examples of evolutionary compromise and outright maladaption in nature, and claims that humans are "the only ones who have these problems."  And his answer, according to The Daily Mail:  "He suggests that Neanderthals such as Homo erectus were crossbred with another species, perhaps from Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star system to our solar system, some 4.37 light years away from the sun."

Right.  "Neanderthals such as Homo erectus."  Which were two entirely different species, making that statement a little like saying, "Pigeons such as eagles."  And somehow, an alien species coming from an entirely different star system would have DNA that was compatible enough to proto-hominids (whatever species they were) that they could produce offspring at all?

Funny, isn't it, that there is a 98.7% overlap, genetically, between humans and our nearest relatives, the bonobos?  And that our bone structure shows 100% homology with other primates?  And that we give every evidence, in every respect, of being perfectly ordinary terrestrial animals, without a drop of green extraterrestrial blood?

Of course, this hasn't stopped woo-woo websites from picking up the story, and giving Dr. Ellis Silver Ph.D. all sorts of undeserved attention.  Besides his appearance in The Daily Mail, Silver has made Prison Planet, Above Top Secret, UFO Sightings Hotspot, Unexplained Mysteries, and a host of other "news" sources even less reputable.

Oh, and I forgot to mention why Silver thinks all of this happened.  "One reason for this," Silver says,"is that the Earth might be a prison planet, since we seem to be a naturally violent species and we're here until we learn to behave ourselves."

Well, that certainly seems to be working out well, doesn't it?

You know, I think this sort of thing springs from the same desire that drives a lot of the religious attitudes toward humanity vis-à-vis nature -- that we humans are somehow different, special, set apart.  I still see it in my biology classes, in which even bright kids will use phrases like "humans and animals," as if humans weren't animals themselves.  So I guess if you don't get your sense of species superiority from being a Unique Creation of God, you have to get it from being the Progeny of Aliens.

So that's our journey into the far side for today.  It's not, mind you, that I have any particular objection to the conjecture that life may exist elsewhere in the universe -- in fact, I think that to be so likely as to be a near certainty.  I just think that the chance of their being our great-grandparents contradicts everything we know about biology, human and otherwise, and that's even taking into account how odd my own family can be at times.