| THE ZOOLOGIST'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves Arik Kershenbaum New York: Penguin Press, March 2021 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-9848-8196-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-9848-8196-5 | 356pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
Dr. Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist, lecturer, and fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He has studied animal communication around the world, scoping out the methods various species use to communicate among themselves and with other species, and how these relate to their patterns of behavior.
In this book he proposes to describe a set of general principles that will apply not just on Earth, but on alien planets where life as we understand it may develop. Central to his quest is the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest: that nothing evolves unless it benefits individuals of a species by improving their chances to survive and reproduce in their current environment. Those principles include the basic physical benefits of being able to sense your environment, to move within it, to harness energy, and to avoid being eaten. Dr. Kershenbaum posits that evolution, coupled with the laws of physics, will result in life forms broadly similar to those of Earth.
Our planet, of course, harbors an amazing variety of life forms — and even more bizarre ones existed in the past.1 But the question is, does Earth life represent the limits of how bizarre life forms can be?
It's a popular belief that alien life is too alien to imagine. I don't agree. Science has given us the ability to move beyond such a pessimistic outlook, and we do seem to be able to identify some clues about what alien life may be like. This book is about using our understanding of how life works and, most importantly, how life evolves, to understand how life will be on other planets. – Page 4 |
His argument, at bottom, is that form follows function; that aliens will need to: obtain energy; to move about; to sense their environment; to cooperate; to acquire and retain knowledge; and, as they acquire intelligence, to form productive societies. All this makes sense, and supports his argument that alien life forms will be similar to the forms we know in many ways. I have to believe, however, that human imagination is not so limited. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, gave us the octopoids: intelligent beings who communicate via color patterns formed by patches on their "chests." Robert Forward gave us life on a neutron star. Isaac Asimov gave us beings of three sexes who intermingle and become one solid being when they mate (in, it is true, an alternate universe.) Dr. Kershenbaum, no stranger to science fiction, mentions some of these possibilities, so he is not dogmatic. Still, I formed the impression that he finds them extremely unlikely. He mentions J.B.S. Haldane (page 177); has he never heard of Haldane's dictum that "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine."?
He also discounts the changes that may take place during long sweeps of time. For example, citing Planet of the Apes, which he calls a formative film of his teenage years, he doubts that the apes could evolve spoken language because they wouldn't need to.
George Kingsley Zipf was an American linguist who formally described this law in the 1930s. It posits that the rank of any word in English is inversely proportional to its frequency of occurrence. Thus, the most common English word ("the") is found twice as often in English text as the second most common word ("of"), three times as often as the third most common word ("and"), and so on.
The author observes that Zipf's Law holds for all human languages, and he devotes four pages to discussing it (pages 251-254.) He reports that animal communications have so far been too simple to analyze by this criterion, and speculates about how interesting it would be to subject the contents of a message from an ET source to such analysis.
Zipf's Law in fact also holds for invented languages like Esperanto, and for many other systems of data subject to statistical analysis. The reason why this should be so remains unknown.2
The iconic 1960s film Planet of the Apes portrayed a world with a fully fledged civilization of talking chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, far in Earth's future after human civilization has destroyed itself. Is this likely? Are the intelligent but not-quite-linguistic species of today, like great apes and dolphins, simply waiting in the wings to step into our shoes when we are gone? Perhaps these species are already trudging slowly along an evolutionary road that will lead them to language, and if we wait patiently (several millions of years) then we will share the planet with other creatures that talk and write poetry, and possibly build spaceships too? – Page 244 |
First I would note that it is not clear whether dolphins have what can be termed a language. He tells us (pages 213-14) that dolphins have "signature whistles" that function as names by which they recognize individuals they have known, even after decades apart. On page 220 he tells us "The reason why two very intelligent and very social animals like wolves and dolphins have bucked the obvious trend of using sound sequences to communicate simply has not been investigated enough yet, and this is one of my own fields of research." He notes (pages 58-9) that vampire bats display social behavior, even feeding companions they find to have not hunted successfully that night, and that dolphin brains are similar in structure to bat brains, which he attributes to the fact that both use sound pulses for observing their environment and locating prey. He argues that cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) display what we consider intelligence despite having brains yet more unlike ours than those of dolphins.
The book is well written in a lively fashion, avoiding jargon. Dr. Kershenbaum's explanations are clear, and for the most part his reasoning is solid. There are a few confusing passages, and in my opinion he — despite his wide-ranging acquaintance with works of science fiction — dismisses unlikely possibilities too readily. For these reasons I lowered the score of the book one notch. It is still very much worth reading, and its index and recommended reading list make it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.