E.O. Wilson: Aliens Are Out There and They Probably Look Like This | Big Think

E.T. is out there. There just has to be, in the hundred million star systems, a galaxy that we belong to, that we dwell in, other cases of life originating. Because we now know there's so many planets that almost certainly you're going to have certain planets that are Goldilocks; that is, in the right position nearest their sun, the right size, and so on, that can have the potential to create life.

And of those, it seems, and we don't have any basis for this except intuition, that given enough millions of years—in our case we have had half a billion years since life came on the land—to produce a human grade eusocial species. So we can only guess that it's likely that that has occurred in some of them.

So, here's what I did. In the course of this book, actually, I did it with some care: the Meaning of Human Existence. I looked over the many examples of the origin of whole new lines of animals that have occurred on the land since the early Paleozoic. Now we're talking going back more than 415 million years; that's a long time. The land of Earth was populated by the first plants, then forests, and with them a whole array of animal types.

But we have these many multiple lines of animals that originated, and we can, I think, reasonably conclude that eusociality—when it did it develop—includes big animals that have the capacity to create a big brain, cerebrum, and memory storage areas essentially is what it is. And this bizarre round head shape that we have—I mean, seen from the point of view of a gorilla, we have a bizarre funny-looking head; that here is what they all have in common.

Now, I'm talking empirical information. First, you have to be on the land. You can't develop advanced societies and anything like civilization, which in humans goes back a couple hundred thousand years. Well, why not? Why no marine or freshwater creatures? Because they don't have fire. You just have to have, in order to build tools beyond chipping some rock or stone away, or maybe crude binding or fashioning materials together, you don't have any way to create more advanced technology without a concentrated power source that you can transport from one place to another.

E.T.—and now drawing this again from the record of multiple origins of animal lines on Earth—E.T. has got a head. And the head's upfront, and the head contains a central organizing center for all of the senses that are spread out through the body. E.T. has got a small number of limbs—multiple, maybe six, who knows, maybe eight like a spider—but not that many, relatively few. And E.T. has on these limbs fingers or tentacles, something with strength and flexibility that are free.

That was the prerequisite that we had when we stepped out of the trees; our ancestors did five million years or so ago. The earliest known Australopithecus prehuman already was walking on hind legs. That was just an adaptation it had. And one of the consequences of freeing the front legs is that now you have organs that can be modified to manipulate.

But there's more. And that is, you have to have soft pulpy fingertips. And when you think about it, think about the primates you know, Old World and New World. That's a primate trait: soft pulpy fingertips. Because you need those to manipulate finely. In our ancestors' case, and all the primates that are arboreal and so on, you need to be able to manipulate bits of food, like plucking free a piece of fruit, plucking seeds out of a fruit, taking a flower and opening it and eating it, and so on. So that's another trait of E.T.

And I would admonish scriptwriters for Hollywood films that have space and alien monsters invading Earth: don't give them claws. Claws are for carnivores, and you've got to be an omnivore to be an E.T. There just isn't enough energy available in the next trophic level down to maintain big populations and stable populations that can evolve civilization. That was a bit of a stretch, but I feel confident about that. Claws? No, that's for carnivores.

E.T. is big. Not big elephant size, adjusted for gravity. If you have very light gravity on a smaller planet, you would be able to get a gigantic animal that's very mobile. For a planet Earth size, an elephant is just too big to really get anywhere. A primate is just the right size. This is sort of the Goldilocks rule for size.

So those are some of the traits of E.T. And to that, I'll add— in addition to being an omnivore—that they will have moral instincts. That is, they will be able to be generous, to at least some extent, caring and altruistic—not just to individuals of their own species but to other species. And there's a reason I say that, and that is because almost certainly all of the eusocial creatures that produce advanced societies did so through group selection.

Group versus group. When you have groups competing with groups and helping drive social instincts by this Darwinian superiority of cooperation within the group, then you have the capacity for a moral system within a group, and then eventually between groups under certain circumstances, but not nearly as strong between groups as it is within groups. That, I think, is a statement of the prevailing theory of the origin of morality in human beings.

And I'll close this with a mantra that's useful, and that is as follows: within a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals if you have both genetic propensity—those who have a genetic propensity towards selfishness versus those that have a capacity for altruism and more cooperative behavior within the group. The selfish ones prevail over the altruistic ones.

But in competition between groups—which is absolutely intense in all eusocial species, including humans—and that group competition is what defines humans to a large extent, between groups the competition is such that groups of altruists defeat groups of selfish individuals. So you get a kind of balance always in human evolution between a tendency to be increasingly altruistic and cooperative, balanced to some extent by a tendency of individuals in these groups to behave in a selfish manner with respect to others.

And that's balance in human beings, and it's unstable. It can never come to some point like a Nash equilibrium and stop, but it means that we're always going—this is the nature of humans; that we are eternally, internally, eternally conflicted in our thinking, in our self-examination, and in the decisions we're making.

And that's a good thing that it's unstable, that it's a product of this great fundamental conflict, because that's the source of human creativity in the creative arts, and competitive behavior among people and between groups that drives a lot of the best salience of the evolution of civilization.