Extraterrestrial Civilizations (2 page)

Quite right, but consider this—

When we lead from ignorance, we can come to no conclusions. When we say, “Anything can happen, and anything can be, because we know so little that we have no right to say ‘This is’ or ‘This isn’t,’ ” then all reasoning comes to a halt right there. We can eliminate nothing; we can assert nothing. All we can do is put words and thoughts together on the basis of intuition or faith or revelation and, unfortunately, no two people seem to share the same intuition or faith or revelation.

What we must do is set rules and place limits, however arbitrary these may seem to be. We then discover what we can say within these rules and limits.

The scientific view of the Universe is such as to admit only those phenomena that can, in one way or another, be observed in a fashion accessible to all, and to admit those generalizations (which we call laws of nature) that can be induced from those observations.

Thus, there are exactly four force fields that control all the interactions of subatomic particles and therefore, in the long run, all phenomena. These are, in order of discovery, the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the strong nuclear, and the weak nuclear interactions. No phenomenon that has been observed fails to be explained by one or another of these forces. No phenomenon is as yet so puzzling that scientists must conclude that some fifth force other than the four I’ve listed must exist.

It is perfectly possible to say that there is a fifth type of
interaction that exists, but cannot be observed, or a sixth, or any number. If it cannot be observed, if it cannot make itself evident in any way, nothing is gained by talking about it—except, perhaps, for the amusement of inventing a fantasy.
^*
It is also perfectly possible to say that there is a fifth interaction (or a sixth or any number) that can indeed be observed, but only by certain people and only under certain unpredictable conditions.

That may conceivably be so, but it doesn’t fall within the purview of science since under those conditions,
anything
can be said. I can say that the Rocky Mountains are made out of emeralds that have the property of looking like ordinary rock to everyone else but me. You can’t disprove that statement but of what value is it? (Far from being of value, such statements are so annoying to people generally that anyone who insists on making them is liable to be treated as insane.)

Science deals only with phenomena that can be reproduced; observations that, under certain fixed conditions, can be made by anybody of normal intelligence; observations upon which reasonable men
^†
can agree.

It may well be argued, in fact, that science is the only field of human intellectual endeavor on which reasonable men can very often agree, and in which reasonable men can sometimes change their minds as new evidence comes in. In politics, art, literature, music, philosophy, religion, economics, history—carry on the list as long as you wish—otherwise reasonable men can not only disagree, but invariably do, and sometimes with the utmost passion; and never change their minds, either, it would appear.

Of course, the scientific world view has not been handed down intact from time immemorial. It was discovered and worked out little by little. It is not complete now, and it may never be entirely complete. New refinements, modifications, additions may seem fantasy at first (quantum theory and relativity certainly did), but there
are well-known ways of testing such things carefully; and if the theories pass, they are accepted. The testing method is not always simple and easy, and in the course of the testing disputations may arise
^*
and verification may be unnecessarily delayed.

Acceptance will come in the end, though, for scientific thought is self-correcting as long as there is reasonable freedom of research and publication. (Without infinite money and infinite space, it is hard to be sure of
absolute
freedom, of course.)

All this is my justification for having this book deal with the supernormal whenever necessary, but never with the supernatural. In the discussion of nonhuman intelligence that will occupy us in this book, we will consider neither angels nor demons, neither God nor Devil, nor anything that is not accessible to observation and experiment and reason.

In our search for nonhuman intelligence on Earth, then, having eliminated all the wonderful things the human imagination has constructed out of nothing, we must find what we can in the dull things we can sense and observe.

Of the natural objects on Earth, we can, in our search for intelligence, at once eliminate the inanimate, or nonliving ones.

This is by no means an indisputable decision, for it is not an impossible thought that consciousness and intelligence are inherent in all matter; that individual atoms, even, have a certain microquantity of such things.

That may be so, but since such consciousness or intelligence cannot (as yet, at least, and we have no choice but to go with the “as yet”) be in any way measured, or even observed, it falls outside the Universe as I intend to deal with it, and we can eliminate it.

Besides, if we are looking for nonhuman intelligence, it may be taken for granted that we are seeking for intelligence that, while
present in something other than a human being, is nevertheless at least roughly comparable in quality to intelligence in a human being. That means it must be intelligence we can clearly recognize as such, and whatever intelligence there may be in a rock, it is not the kind of intelligence we can recognize.

Ah, but must all kinds of intelligence be the same, or even similar, or even recognizable? Might not a boulder be as intensely intelligent as we are, or more intensely, but be so in a completely unrecognizable way?

If that is so, there is nothing to prevent us from saying that every individual object in the entire Universe is as intelligent as a human being, or more intelligent than one, but that in the case of every single one of those objects, the nature of the intelligence is so different from ours as to be unrecognizable.

If we can successfully maintain that, all argument stops right there and there is no room for further investigation. We
must
set limits, if we are to continue. In searching for nonhuman intelligence, we can reasonably limit ourselves to such intelligence that we can recognize as such (even if only dimly) from reproducible observations and by using our own intelligence as a standard.

It is possible that intelligence may be so different from ours that we don’t recognize it at once, but do come to recognize it by degrees. However, in all the years of human association with inanimate objects, there has been no real reason to suppose any of them to have shown any sign of intelligence, however small
^*
and it is as reasonable as anything can well be to eliminate them.

If we pass on to animate objects, we might next raise the question of how we distinguish between inanimate and animate objects. The distinction is harder than we might think, but it is irrelevant. All those objects that offer the slightest chance of confusion as to their classification, whether living or nonliving, clearly do not represent reasonable claims to the possession of nonhuman intelligence.

And of those objects that are indisputably living, we can eliminate the entire plant world. There is no recognizable intelligence in
the most magnificent redwood, the sweetest-smelling rose, the most ferocious Venus’s-flytrap.
^*

When it comes to animals, however, matters are different. Animals move as we do and have recognizable needs and fears as we do. They eat, sleep, eliminate, reproduce, seek comfort, and avoid danger. Because of this, there is a tendency to read into their actions human motivation and human intelligence.

Thus, to the human imagination, ants and bees, which follow behavior that is purely instinctive and with little or no scope for individual variation, or for behavior change to meet unlooked-for eventualities, are viewed as being purposefully industrious.

The snake, which slithers through the grass because that is the only way its evolved shape and structure makes it possible for it to move, and which thus avoids notice and can strike before being seen, is imagined to be sly and subtle. (This characterization can be upheld on the authority of the Bible—see Genesis 3:1.)

In similar fashion, the donkey is thought of as stupid, the lion and eagle as proud and regal, the peacock as vain, the fox as cunning, and so on.

It is almost inevitable that wholesale attribution of human motivations to animal actions will lead one to take it for granted that if one could but establish communication with particular animals one would find them of human intelligence.

This is not to say that particular human beings, if pinned to the wall, will admit believing this. Nevertheless, we can watch Disney cartoons featuring animals with human intelligence and remain comfortably unaware of the incongruence.

Of course, such cartoons are just an amusing game, and the willing suspension of disbelief is a well-known characteristic of human beings. Then, too, Aesop’s fables and the medieval chronicles of Reynard the Fox are not really about talking animals, but are ways of expressing truths about social abuses without risking the displeasure of those in power—who may not be bright enough to recognize that they are being satirized.

Nevertheless, the enduring popularity of these animal stories, to
which one can add Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” tales and Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Dolittle” stories, shows a certain readiness in the human being to suspend disbelief in that particular direction; more so, perhaps, than in others. There is a sneaking feeling, I suspect, that if animals aren’t as intelligent as we are, they ought to be.

We cannot even seek refuge in the fact that talking-animal stories are essentially for children. The recent best-sellerdom of
Watership Down
by Richard Adams is an example of a talking-animal book for adults that I found profoundly moving.

—And yet, side by side with this ancient and primordial feeling of cousinship with animals (even while we hunted them down or enslaved them) there is, in Western thought at least, the consciousness of an impassable gulf between human beings and other animals.

In the Biblical account of creation, the human being is created by God through an act different from that which created the rest of the animals. The human being is described as created in God’s image and as being given dominion over the rest of creation.

This difference can be interpreted as meaning that the human being has a soul and that other animals do not; that there is a spark of divinity and immortality in human beings that is not present in other animals; that there is in human beings something that will survive death, while nothing of the sort is present in other animals.

All this falls outside the purview of science and can be disregarded. The influence of such religious views, however, makes it easier to believe that human beings alone are reasoning entities and that no other animal is. This, at least, is something that can be tested and observed by the usual methods of science.

Nevertheless, human beings have not been secure enough in the uniqueness of our species to be willing to let it stand the test of scientific investigation. There has even been a certain nervousness about the tendency of those biologists with a strong concept of order to classify living things into species, genera, orders, families, and so on.

By grouping animals according to greater and lesser resemblances, one develops a kind of tree of life with different species occupying different twigs of different branches. What starts out as an inescapable metaphor suggests only too clearly the possibility that the tree grew; that the branches developed.

In short, the mere classification of species leads inexorably to the
suspicion that life evolved; that more intelligent species, for instance, developed from less intelligent ones; and that, in particular, human beings developed from primitive species that lacked the capacities we now consider peculiarly human.

Indeed, when Charles Darwin published his
On the Origin of Species
in 1859, there was an outburst of anger against it, even though Darwin carefully avoided discussing human evolution. (It was to be another decade before he dared publish
The Descent of Man
.)

To this day, many people find it difficult to accept the fact of evolution. They don’t, apparently, find the suggestion offensive that there are human characteristics in animals such as mice (who can be more lovable than Mickey?), but they do find it offensive that we ourselves may be descended from subhuman ancestors.

In the classification of animals there is an order called Primates, which includes those popularly known as monkeys and apes. In their appearance the primates resemble the human being more than any other animals do, and from that appearance it is natural to deduce that they are more closely related to human beings than other animals are. In fact, the human being must be included as a primate, if any sense at all is to be made of animal classification.

Once evolution is accepted, one must come to the inevitable conclusion that the various primates,
including the human being
, have developed from some single ancestral stem and that all are to varying degrees cousins, so to speak.

The resemblance of other primates to human beings is both endearing and repulsive. The monkey house is always the most popular exhibit in a zoo, and people will watch anthropoid apes (which most closely resemble the human being) with fascination.

The English dramatist William Congreve wrote in 1695, however, “I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.” It is not hard to guess that those “mortifying reflections” must have been to the effect that human beings might be described as large and somewhat more intelligent monkeys.

Those who oppose the idea of evolution are often particularly hard on apes, exaggerating their nonhuman characteristics in order to
make less likely any notion of kinship between them and ourselves.