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The Humanoid Form

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Ron Collins

Ron Collins

Curiously Confused
I recently had a spirited discussion with a friend about the UFO topic. My friend does not give the subject of UFO's much credit. He is a "White House Lawner" and cant seem to move past this one logic trap. Anyway, for the first time in our abmittedly brief argu...discussions on the subject he started down the road of aliens/occupants. He used aliens and I used occupants.

Anyhow, another firend was listening quietly. The Lawner starts talking about how "UFO nuts always talk about grey guys and green guys or whatever, but they are always two arms and two legs. Just like in Star Trek. Like that makes any sense whatsoever." My second buddy is an Orthopedist so he chimes in. He says that the humanoid form is incredably efficient and suited for advanced development.

He goes into things like blood flow (how we keep cool and warm), muscle architecture, intracate mobility of our limbs and digits, our nuerological efficiency and skelatal adaptability. He ends our latest discussion saying, "I would expect that it would be possible and actually more probable that a species capable of advanced social and technological means would have many of the same characteristics of our form rather than those of less efficeint design. There is a reason that humans are the only animal on the planet to have developed technological sophistication and that is because of their anatomy. If you want a litmus test for what doesnt work, just look at every other animal species on the planet throughout history."

I honestly had never thought of it quite like that before. I guess I always kind of assumed that since the occupants seem to be experts at deception, perhaps the humanoid appearance was part of it or something. I never had a good reason why at any rate. I'm a techie so Biology is that subject I gotta low B in and forgot the following semester. To me it was truely mind boggling.

Anyway, I have asked him to join the forum and take a look at my pathetic attempt to cover our conversation. It is almost certainly wrong. I'm not sure he will have the time or inclination to do so, but I thought I would mention it and see what some of you had to say on the subject.
 
Well that's certainly thorough. This is something I've been saying for years (considerably more simplisticaly of course). Lots of animals are intelligent (elephants, whales, dolphins, etc) but only one gets classified as sentient and that's US, which means we have a grand total of ONE templates on which to base assumptions about intelligent species elsewhere in the universe (ie humanoids). Certainly there may be exception but these would be the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule.
 
CapnG said:
Well that's certainly thorough. This is something I've been saying for years (considerably more simplisticaly of course). Lots of animals are intelligent (elephants, whales, dolphins, etc) but only one gets classified as sentient and that's US, which means we have a grand total of ONE templates on which to base assumptions about intelligent species elsewhere in the universe (ie humanoids). Certainly there may be exception but these would be the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule.
Click to expand...

what, I would never-ever think another life form to be non-sentient.
 
I've faced the fact that facts/events occur in life that make no sense.

Dismissing evidence because it makes no sense to one's beliefs is like those people who dismiss the evidence OJ is a double murderer because it made no sense why someone would do that outside of their own children's home. Jeffrey Dahmer makes little sense. It happened. Bush being in office is mind blowing. 9/11 seemed impossible to many people's mind.

We don't know what percent of creatures are humanoid in our universe. I expect we won't for a long time, if ever.

There are many reports of these beings being a ball of light. This gets swept under the rug, (or they don't know about it) by the people that still use little green men as if it is a central evidentiary theme in ufology.

I think it's reasonable to question the issue. Certainly many reports aren't actual events. Hoaxes, delusions, dreams, something else unknown, and people are just creating or seeing an archetype they are conditioned to seeing. But I'm not comfortable throwing out evidence because it doesn't fit with how I think aliens should look.

Then there is the possibility that humans are some how related to some of these beings. Either through their creation or genetic guidance of us/apes, or it being us, or something we manufactured in the future. Entertaining those types of notions make it easier to deal with the likeness issue.

Michael Swords once said something I found funny. The chances of you shaking hands with a pancake off a ufo is zero. Or something like that. He was addressing the issue this thread is about.

Also, the fact that we are humanoid and they are humanoid might make us stand out as more interesting since we are a like. Easier to relate too. Perhaps the pancakes spend their time visiting other alien pancakes. After they get a humanoid to build their ship of course:)
 
To play the Devil's Advocate, human arrogance could also explain why we perceive so-called "alien races" as humanoid. If we are to look at this objectively, the conditions of whatever world these things allegedly come from would have to be very similar to ours in planetary conditions and gravity. For another creature to independantly evolve into a bipedal humanoid of roughly the same height and body shape this would have to be the case. This is one of the reasons I believe the so-called Greys are actually human; they simply look too much like us to be anything but.

As for the most successful species to reign this planet, that title goes hands-down to the dinosaurs. Modern man's earliest ancestor, australopithecus first showed up 2 million years ago. By comparison, the dinosaurs ruled this earth for over 160 million years, if one is only to include the large vertebrates that existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous periods.
 
We only have one planet's biology to base our expectations on, which is largely useless as a basis to extrapolate.
Every terrestrial vertebrate is descended from a four-finned bony fish, which means we don't have much idea of what the possibilities are. If they'd been six-finned, could we have evolved a centaur-like body plan?
Or would the extra limbs give the nervous system too much work to do?
Our fellow animals that all look so different are just variations on a theme. Even fruit flies are ultimately related to us (which is just one of the reasons it's very useful to study their genetics, despite what Palin thinks).
Go back far enough and the rhododendron is your cousin...so we just don't have the sort of independent samples that we'd need to know what life is capable of.
It's not just the limbs. What's a good number of eyes for a large, active and intelligent animal? How many ways are there to construct them, and where do they need to go? What other sensory organs can such an organism find a use for that might plausibly evolve, and where can they go?

Here's a point however: even if there are lots of alternatives to the humanoid body plan as we know it, the basic arrangement obviously works reasonably well and is at least as likely to arise as anything else. So perhaps creatures who have that body plan deliberately choose Earth to visit because being around us doesn't give them the creeps. Or crews are choosen from species that vaguely resemble us. Or they make them (or grow the bodies and use them the way we use remotely controlled robotic devices...or space suits).
 
Kevin Daly said:
Here's a point however: even if there are lots of alternatives to the humanoid body plan as we know it, the basic arrangement obviously works reasonably well and is at least as likely to arise as anything else. So perhaps creatures who have that body plan deliberately choose Earth to visit because being around us doesn't give them the creeps. Or crews are choosen from species that vaguely resemble us. Or they make them (or grow the bodies and use them the way we use remotely controlled robotic devices...or space suits).
Click to expand...

Or, perhaps it is just one of those things that seems to work out. Lets consider this, perhaps the humanoid form is more "normal" in technologically sophisticated beings wherever they come from. The universe has an elegance. Physics has an elegance. Biology has an elegance. Just as laws of physics are consistent across the universe, so should be the laws of biology and natural selection. Therefore, life on other worlds may come up with a similar solution to the problem as is found on earth.

I presume that this elegance cold also transcend our "reality" into other realities. Thus giving the same sort of result there.

I dunno. Some of this is like trying to decipher what my wife "really" wants. I could have a billion ideas and they are all assuredly wildly wrong.
 
I feel that we(in terms of our scientific community) should not be making too much of claims concerning what is more likely or less likely to evolve.

Until we have a good grasp of the practical scope, limits and potential functionality of genetic systems we are, for the most part, in the dark.

Observations about how we are physiologically well-suited for the task of technological manipulations are clearly pertinent. But, strictly speaking, perhaps such observations are only pertinent to our own evolutionary tale.

Suffice to say that the actual capability of genetic systems undeniably(surely?) dictates, to a large degree, what can possibly evolve.
 
RonCollins said:
Or, perhaps it is just one of those things that seems to work out. Lets consider this, perhaps the humanoid form is more "normal" in technologically sophisticated beings wherever they come from. The universe has an elegance. Physics has an elegance. Biology has an elegance. Just as laws of physics are consistent across the universe, so should be the laws of biology and natural selection. Therefore, life on other worlds may come up with a similar solution to the problem as is found on earth.

I presume that this elegance cold also transcend our "reality" into other realities. Thus giving the same sort of result there.

I dunno. Some of this is like trying to decipher what my wife "really" wants. I could have a billion ideas and they are all assuredly wildly wrong.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I get your point. Evolution is an inherently ad hoc process: it works by modifying or adding to things that already exist. Its products don't have to be ideal forms, they just have to be able to do the job. Inevitably this means lots of different ways of skinning the proverbial cat. While it's not true that anything's possible, one sample biosphere of related organisms doesn't give us a good idea of what the likely range of possibilities is.
Hey, I'm the Theist (and I think Dawkins is a Dork :)), I shouldn't be the one having to point these things out...
 
The example I use when this criticism is brought up is that some forms just naturally work better than others. Given that we only have one planet's biology as a reference but considering the vastly varying environmental conditions that exist on earth it is interesting to note that evolution has produced only two successful types of eyes: the camera eye and the compound eye. All living things on earth that have eyes have one or the other.

If anyone knows of an exception to this please let me know as I have never heard otherwise.
 
CapnG said:
I thought simple eyes were a seperate, third type?
Click to expand...

I might have my terminology a bit off. According to this I should have said simple and compound eyes. Previously I had heard of simple eyes being referred to as camera eyes. Two general configurations and ten different layouts among the two types. Certainly there is a huge variety in eye size/performance/etc among the species but it seems like a pretty accessible example to raise when people offer the "aliens wouldn't be bipedal" argument. As was raised in the skepticblog comments linked by dusty, complex tool use requires free hands.
 
Kevin Daly said:
I'm not sure I get your point.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure I do either. I guess I am just saying that billions of types and configurations of animals have evolved on earth. As far as we know, we are the smartest and most technilogically advanced of those types. We are suited for hunting, farming, exploring, making war, intellectual thought, art, and science equally. In fact we excel at all of them. We mold our environment to our liking. Right or wrong we do it and no other animal has ever done this in our planets history. I attribute much of this to the evolutionary process.

But I also think that things we know are not good and efficient designs here on earth would most likely not be good designs on distant worlds either. Conversely, elements of highly efficient designs might be present. Symmetry for one seems to be highly efficient. I guess my postulation is that the humanoid form may be something like this. Something that is so highly efficient that evolutionary cycles, given time, will almost always produce it.
 
Anubis said:
To play the Devil's Advocate, human arrogance could also explain why we perceive so-called "alien races" as humanoid. If we are to look at this objectively, the conditions of whatever world these things allegedly come from would have to be very similar to ours in planetary conditions and gravity. For another creature to independantly evolve into a bipedal humanoid of roughly the same height and body shape this would have to be the case. This is one of the reasons I believe the so-called Greys are actually human; they simply look too much like us to be anything but.

As for the most successful species to reign this planet, that title goes hands-down to the dinosaurs. Modern man's earliest ancestor, australopithecus first showed up 2 million years ago. By comparison, the dinosaurs ruled this earth for over 160 million years, if one is only to include the large vertebrates that existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous periods.
Click to expand...

But I don't know many carnivourous dinosaurs to walk on all fours - preferring, and most suitably designed to be bipedular - my bet would have always been on the velociraptor.

Can we assume that size matters and/or is it a function of the atmospheric density - too small, preditation - too large, sustainability?

Exoskeletons cannot work for more than 1/2M for atmos. density and pressure.

And, I do not know of any life - to metabolise without water(liquid) yet - even cyrophillic/thermophillic bacteria - so, I do concur that most conditions must be enable of providing liquid water (so temp/press/atmos density ranges will be narrow).

For a land based species - the humanoid form seems tailored for success - sustainability, predatation, agility, strength and speed. The only thing missing is flight - and for that we would have to sacrifice our body mass and muscular ratio for running speed - and Continental Airlines.
 
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