The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens- and Ourselves – Arik Kershenbaum

Little green men from mars are a cliche. ‘Greys’ hold alittle more cultural weight, with some people believing the story about the almond eyed aliens. What is important to note is that most people’s conception of what aliens should look like stems from what we look like. I blame it on a misunderstanding of evolution, and a notion that humanity is somehow peak evolution. Evolution, of course, has no peaks, and is more akin to water running in to fit the crevasses of a certain ecological niche. This is less well known, even by relatively middle class educated people.

Reading and consuming science-fiction brings you face to face with heaps of different descriptions of aliens, often with the accusation of each different described species being “just thinly veiled humans”. I find this criticism to be missing the point, but there is a certain fun in watching people competitively write alien races and be lampooned for doing a bad job of it. My favorite bit of sillyness comes from China Meiville’s ‘Embassytown,” where a sentient race is somehow absent symbolic reasoning.

So do we just have no idea what these creatures will look like?

We don’t. And for the most part we never will, we are missing the detail laden devil that would give us this answer. If you want to know what aliens will look like, you first need to know where they are from. Once you have that knowledge, you can have some reasonable expectation about what they might look like.

In that light, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy does a pretty good job going into factors and effects. Chapter by chapter, it looks at one specific factor that would effect the evolution of an alien species, thus giving us an idea of what reasonable expectation we may have about what they will be like.. If you are expecting an answer besides “we don’t really know, but…” then your expectations are too high. A book like this obviously cannot be conclusive. What you end up with is a review of what biological science currently knows, mixed together with some interesting questions about the implications.

Popular science is a genre of book that continues to give me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it feels a bit boring to me. I don’t have any formal scientific background, and I keep assuming that books like this are what I should be reading to maintain my ‘layperson’s’ perspective. I should perhaps start copping to the the fact that either my education has been supplemented by the reading I have already done, or that I am generally better suited to reading something a little bit more sophisticated, despite lacking the confidence. “CONTINGENCY AND CONVERGENCE” has been on my radar for some time, and maybe I should just dive into that and see what failure and successes come along from reading it. But there is also a constant reminder that I don’t always have the background for the sciences, and sometimes details about things I don’t know tend to get missed.