| Life and Language beyond Earth |
Introduction
Overview Presentation
Astronomy
Evolutionary Biology Palaeoanthropology Neuroscience
Language & Linguistics Criticism News
The central question for this book is: ‘Do beings exist on planets beyond our Solar System with whom we could engage in meaningful exchange?’ To approach this issue we can break it down as follows:
Four basic questions about life and language beyond Earth
The following sections offer a brief outline of the main sections in the book. If you are curious about any or all of these matters then you will find in-depth discussions in Life and Language beyond Earth along with a detailed final chapter which assesses the likelihood of conditions similar to those with humans on Earth arising on an exoplanet and which weighs up the possibility of our ever coming in contact with intelligent beings from another world and how we might communicate with them.
| Introduction |
A common question asked these days is ‘Are we alone in the universe?’. It looks like a simple question with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. But far from it, the question involves a whole raft of issues which need to identified and discussed. Let’s begin by deconstructing the question.
1) evolutionary biology
The book is organised into six major sections with each devoted to specific issues in the relevant areas of science treated in the book (see table below). Certain readers may not need to read sections closely which they are au fait with from their professional background.
First ‘universe’, that's relatively easy. For all practical purposes, now and for the foreseeable future, by ‘universe’ we can only mean a radius of some tens of light years around us, maybe a hundred light years at most. That is only a tiny fraction of our galaxy, the Milk Way. Our galaxy is, however, only one of several hundred billions in the observable universe and possibly only one of trillions and trillions of galaxies in the actual universe. So the patch of space which ‘universe’ in the initial question can refer to is an infinitesimally small area in a universe of inconceivable vastness. Nonetheless, since the advent of modern exoplanetology we know that nearly all stars have planetary systems and that some planets would have conditions similar to those on Earth. There are probably something in the order of 50-100 billion Earth-like planets orbiting stars just in our galaxy alone.
Next comes the plural personal pronoun ‘we’. I think it is fair to say that when the question is asked, people mean by ‘we’ forms of life which are in principle comparable to us: at least equal in level of intelligence and recognizable in appearance and behaviour and at least as technologically advanced as we humans, though there is much speculation about how far beyond us they might be. And then there is the issue of communication: could we have sensible exchanges with them? To do this, they would have to have a system which is comparable to human language and one which we could decipher and then use for communication. In my book, forms of life for which all that would hold are called ‘exobeings’, i.e. human being analogues on exoplanets.
Recall that complex life forms, on any planet, can only arise from much simpler life forms through Darwinian evolution by natural selection with random mutations, genetic drift and flow in the mix as well. I stress that is the only way exobeings could arise on exoplanets: ultimately from simple cells over at least hundreds of millions of years. To get a handle on how that might happen elsewhere it is necessary to take a closer look at how it happened on Earth and consider key events and developments which led from the simplest of cells to ourselves, Homo sapiens.
The key questions in this connection are (i) how did life arise on Earth, (ii) how did the Homo species come to be, (iii) how did Homo sapiens develop such large brains and, finally, (iv) how did we come to speak, i.e. to have language. The fields of science centrally concerned with these four questions are:
2) palaeoanthropology
3) neuroscience
4) linguistics
| Part | Section | Intended readership |
| I | — | — |
| II | The universe we live in | general readers, not necessarily for astronomers/astrophysicists |
| III | Our story on Earth | general readers, not necessarily for evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists |
| IV | The runaway brain | general readers, not necessarily for neuroscientists |
| V | Language, our greatest gift | general readers, not necessarily for linguists |
| VI | Life and language, here and beyond | all readers |
When searching for exoplanets with life the time factor must be borne in mind. Consider the following possibilities:
1) There may have been exocivilisations with advanced technology which are long since gone.
2) There may be planets with forms of life which, in their future, may evolve into intelligent beings with science and technology capable of interstellar communication.
3) There may be planets with civilisations which are already well into their digital age, even by millions of years.
What we know about exoplanets, general
1) Rocky exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars exist in abundance.
2) Such exoplanets can contain (i) molecular oxygen and (ii) liquid water.
3) Complex organic (carbon-based) molecules have been found outside Earth and are known to exist in the great clouds of dust (proto-planetary disks) from which stars and their planets form.
What we know about exoplanets, details
1) Any elements found on exoplanets would be the same as those we know from Earth (about 90 occurring naturally). Their properties would lead to the same classification, as gases, metals, etc.
2) The fundamental laws of physics and the constants of nature would apply on exoplanets exactly as on Earth.
3) The aggregation of atoms to molecules to macromolecules would apply just as on Earth.
4) The principles and organisation of chemistry, for example, the types of molecules, such as acids, bases, salts, sugars, fats as well as classes of processes, such as redox reactions (involving the gain or loss of electrons), would obtain on an exoplanet just as on Earth.
5) Intermolecular (electrostatic) forces, holding huge numbers of molecules together, e.g. as objects we can observe on our human size scale, would apply just as on Earth.
6) Each exoplanet would likely avail of light and heat from its parent star as sources of energy, though internal sources could also be exploited.
7) Life on an exoplanet would be subject to the gravity of the planet and would adapt accordingly.
8) Life on an exoplanet would require a continuous source of energy to fuel its metabolism. Oxygen is a prime candidate for such a source, though not the only option.
9) Life on an exoplanet would, in its advanced forms, most likely be heterotrophic. This means that they would gain energy from nutrients which they would take in through a process analogous to eating as for animals on Earth.
| Overview Presentation |
Could we Communicate with Exobeings?
| Astronomy |
.jpg)
The observable universe is approximately 93 billion light years in diameter. Nowadays astronomers assume that this is only a tiny fraction of the actual universe. However, we can never see this as light beyond the observable universe can and will never reach us. In fact, the observable universe is decreasing in content (for us) as the expansion rate of the universe is actually increasing and distant galaxies are receding from us at rates which are faster than the speed of light meaning they will pass the horizon of visibility for us in the future.
The Virgo Cluster is part of the Virgo Supercluster (the dot in the middle of the previous image) and contains something in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 galaxies.
The Local Group is also contained in the Virgo Supercluster and consists of the two large galaxies, Andromeda and our own Milky Way, along with tens of further dwarf galaxies. Among the latter are the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds which are dwarf satellites to the Milky Way.
Our Solar System is located in an arm of our galaxy about 26,000 light years from the centre (the above image is an artist's impression; we cannot view our galaxy from the outside but see it tilted on its side as a band of stars across the night sky). The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and contains several hundreds billion stars, nearly all of which host planets, many of which are presumed to be in the habitable zone of their parent stars and thus, in theory, capable of sustaining life if the composition of the planets, their atmospheres and conditions on the surface are suitable.
The inset here shows a region about 5,000 light years across. Our Solar System, with the Sun and its eight planets, is located roughly where the arrow is pointing.
Earth is the third planet out from the Sun, after Mercury and Venus, and before Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. There are millions of trans-Neptunian objects in the distant Kuiper Belt and the even more distant Oort Cloud. Note that in the above image the distances are not shown to scale as this would not be possible given the widths of even very large computer screens. Earth is 150 million kilometres from the Sun which is why the latter appears so small in the sky. All planets, except Mercury and Venus, have moons and their number varies greatly, from one for Earth and to over 90 for Jupiter.
The first matter here is that of abiogenesis. This is the process, as yet unknown how it is triggered, by which life itself begins. There have been many attempts to replicate cell formation and reduplication under laboratory conditions but none of these led to life forms being created.
On any exoplanet with life abiogenesis must have occurred. Something, sometime, somewhere on the planet must have triggered cell reduplication and thus initiated the long, complex process of biological evolution. Or life-forms may have been delivered to the planets by comets, asteroids or meteorites – the panspermia hypothesis – which some scientists believe could also have been the source of life on Earth. The panspermia hypothesis is not an explanation for abiogenesis, it just pushed the question further back: where did the externally originating lifeforms themselves come from?
Basic questions for biological evolution
Bear in mind that any exobeings on an exoplanet, no matter how far they may be in their digital, post-human, post-biological era will nonetheless have arisen from simple cells to more complex biological organisms through the process of Darwinian evolution involving natural selection and random mutations along with some genetic drift and gene flow. There is no other possible path for lifeforms in our universe.
Shared features between possible exobeings and humans
1) Bodies which would allow them free and flexible movement in the three-dimensional space of their planets.
Differences between possible exobeings and humans
1) Darwinian evolution on their exoplanet may have resulted in beings which are physically organised very differently from us, with brains which we would not immediately recognise as such, maybe with a more distributed nervous system, like an octopus.
Likelihood of life beyond Earth, in decreasing order
Salient features of anatomically modern humans
1) Large pre-frontal cortex with a brain size of about 1200-1400 cc.
And what about language?
Not all linguists agree on just how old human language is or how it arose. Some are of the opinion that the ability to have open-ended grammar, which is not bound to the hear and now, is a fairly recent development arising via a sudden mutation, perhaps about 70,000 years ago, with a single individual (or maybe just a few such persons). However, the majority of linguists working in the field of language evolution hold the view that language developed slowly over a period of some hundreds of thousands of years from an original simple means of basic communication consisting of just some words which gradually evolved into a grammatical system allowing for complex sentences providing nuanceand flexibility to both the internal management of thought and the external communication with other members in social groups. The evidence that our nearest Homo relatives, the Neanderthals (and by extension the Denisovans), had a communication system comparable in principle to our language is compelling.
Consciousness is the seamless inner subjective state which accompanies you in every moment of your wakeful life and which no-one else is privy to. It is a non-physical experience which cannot be observed by examining the brain.
Proposed explanations for consciousness
Type A: Hard-line materialism. There are only physical brain states. Consciousness is an illusion, it has no real existence, but is accounted for by the behaviour and dynamics of the brain (the philosopher Daniel Dennett).
Any exobeings attempting communication outside their solar system would be conscious in a way in principle similar to ours. Exobeings building technological artefacts would have minds which were the product of whatever structures their bodies possess and which would be analogous to our brains. There is no way an organism can be conscious without a physical substrate which enables this. On Earth this is a brain consisting of billions of interconnected neurons, above in the frontal area of the head (with humans). Some functionally similar biological structure would have to exist with exobeings to allow consciousness in these life-forms. However, there would probably be a gradient for degrees of consciousness across their animal kingdom much as there is on Earth.
Consciousness with exobeings would likely manifest itself as a subjective awareness of their surroundings, an ability to reflect on themselves, remember their past and plan their future. With consciousness similar to ours they would have the capacity for abstract thought with which they could solve scientific problems and attain high levels of technological achievement. Consciousness would also be a necessary precondition for any communication system even remotely comparable to human language.
The following are the broadest generalisations which one can make about language on Earth:
1) Language is a system of communication and thought organisation
Five steps to view and analyse language
1) How language is structured and how it can be analysed by linguists
The open-ended flexible nature of human language would apply to any exolanguage, otherwise it would not be adequate for the development of complex societies with advanced technologies. Human language is divided into various interlaced levels as shown in the following diagram.
There is a progression of levels from the left to the right with each level providing the building blocks for the next level as indicated in the following schema.
Furthermore, the relationship of sounds to words is not fixed by some external contingency, but is arbitrary, though fixed by social conventions. Words in a language refer to concepts and do not denote objects in the world directly. This characterstic of human language makes it very flexible and capable of abstract thought, storing information for later retrieval and planning for the future.
I take criticism seriously, even when presented in a few sentences by someone writing anonymously, as is the case with so-called reviews on the internet.
The coverage of the book
My book is intended for general readers who are interested in all aspects of possible life beyond earth with a particular emphasis on systems of communication, i.e. on language. Now there are many books on life beyond earth, written by specialists in certain fields, by astronomers, physicists, biologists, anthropologists and, yes, one or two by linguists. The purpose of my book has been to connect the contributions which these fields have made to the topic of the book. I explicitly state at the beginning (see How to use this book) that many specialists will not need to read sections on their own fields. The book is furthermore constructed in such a way that readers can delve into it as they wish - I don't for a minute think that anyone is going to sit down and read through 670 pages in one go.
Stance is too conservative
Some commentators complained that the stance I have taken on life and language beyond earth is too conservative. To that I would say I have always based my research and writings on scientific data and have engaged only in informed speculation. For instance, life on earth is carbon-based. Now carbon is the most versatile element when it comes to forming those complex molecules used in life-forms. So why assume that on exoplanets some other element is used, like silicon, which is similar in some ways, but not quite as open to bonding with hydrogen and nitrogen as carbon is?
The runaway brain
Humans have brains far in excess of what would have been necessary to survive in our early evolutionary environment. Why did this happen? See the book for further discussion of this complex. BUT, remember that for exobeings on an exoplanet, precisely the same development would have had to occur, otherwise the exoplanets would be environments with a broad range of animal life but nothing remotely comparable to humans.
The problem with “weird life”
During my research into the topic of possible life beyond earth I found again and again that the general public, i.e. not the scientists, tended to favour options which one could label “weird life”. Options for communication like echo location, ultrasound, manipulation of colours or smells have often been mentioned. Yes, these options are found on earth, but they are all specialist mechanisms used by animals who occupy niches where these options make sense (ultrasound and echolocation during darkness or in water as with bats and certain cetaceans respectively). Visual and olfactory mechanisms are interesting, no doubt, but would not show the range and flexibility necessary for advanced communication among exobeings (these mechanisms are used by some animals to signal danger, attract a mate, etc.). Furthermore, as far as we know, these systems do not show compositionality, the combining of small chunks into meaning-carrying units arranged variously to form analogues to human sentences (caveat: this may be true for echo location among cetaceans, the research on this is ongoing). I suppose they might have done that elsewhere on some exoplanet, but how likely is that?
Why sound for communication?
This brings me to sound. There is a single strong reason for placing one's bets on sound as a means of communication on other planets. And it is this: the sounds of nature, falling material like rocks, flowing water, wind, the rustle of leaves and - most importantly - the steps of predators, are all sounds found in the hearing range of most animals, i.e. 50-15,000Hz. Options outside this range, e.g. infrasonic sound waves (those below 20Hz) require animals with huge resonance possibilities, like elephants. The overwhelming majority of animals on earth (those larger than most insects) can hear in roughly the 50-15,000Hz range and that is no coincidence: evolutionary trajectories from simpler forms of animal life would favour the use of sound for the reasons just given. Would my readers, who would like to favour something else, please bear that fact in mind.
A word on sci-fi movies
Movies are a form of entertainment and their creators are not bound to the insights and limits of science in making films. A good example is the movie Arrival which stars a linguist (yes) as the main character. The linguistics of the movie is interesting, no doubt. But consider for a moment that the exobeings (“aliens” in movie parlance) are so-called heptapods (from Greek for “seven-legged”, supposed to sound scientific, I guess) who are contained in huge levitating eggs without any obvious thrust engines - did the movie-makers ever hear of gravity? These heptapods appear to be soft, spongy beings without anything resembling hands. How did they construct their spacecraft? There is no indication of how they work, no control rooms shown, just a corridor leading to a light behind a translucent barrier of some kind. And in true Hollywood fashion, the US military want to deal with the aliens their own inimitable way - blast them to pieces.
Finally, the serious consideration of exolife again
Earth is the sole planet with life which we know so the only way to assess the possibilities of life elsewhere is to examine life on earth and consider how this has evolved here and then venture an opinion on how it might evolve elsewhere. Life on another planet (or maybe moon) can only arise from simple cells through a long process of Darwinian evolution. There is NO other way for life to arise anywhere. This fact immediately provides a clear framework for any speculation about exobeings and their evolutionary history. And yes, the time question is important, there may well be exoplanets - among the roughly 50 billion or so earth-like planets in our galaxy - where there are life-forms far more advanced in their digital age than we are. But the trajectory of their development will have been determined by the Darwinian evolution of their background, just as it was on earth.
So bear in mind the following two main developments here on our planet when thinking about possible life on exoplanets:
1) Life got going quickly after the formation of earth, true. But, the big issue is that the development of eukaryotes from prokaryotes (complex cells - with an enclosed nucleus and various organelles - and from simple ones) took about 1.5 billion years after that with the engulfing and later coopting of mitochondria as ATP (bioenergy) producers in cells. Now we simply do not know whether this development was (a) excruciatingly slow, (b) quite normal, (c) very quick or (d) extraordinary that it happened at all.
2) The development of intelligence on earth was contigent on a particular event: the splitting off of a hominin branch from the chimpanzees about 7-8 million years ago. That took place in the very specific environment of savannah expansion and climate fluctuation in east Africa (and perhaps also in southern Africa, though probably somewhat later). This led to the genus Homo arising which evolved an ever increasing brain size, a brain which was far greater than was necessary for survival in the environment at the time (I am skipping a huge amount of detail here). That development is absolutely key to the rise of our intelligence. But it only happened once, so the question is again: (a) was this exceedingly unlikely to happen, (b) was it quite normal and would happen elsewhere, given roughly equal evolutionary and environmental circumstances? Evolutionary biologists seem to think that (a) is the case, after all intelligence on our level only arose once (and language to go with it - that’s another huge complex, see the book). There must have been an environmental stimulus for the development of the Homo species: when this happened in east Africa, we traded strength for intelligence, developed complex social networks which allowed us to survive in harsh environments, develop human hands (with power and precision grips, much better than chimpanzees) and ultimately overcome a natural fear of fire, all key stages on the path to us modern humans, Homo sapiens.
The highly contingent development of (i) complex cells and (ii) runaway brains makes it impossible to predict with any certainty how this might happen on an exoplanet, but these developments must take place for intelligent life to occur elsewhere. How long this process might take, and the particular trajectories it might show, remains to be seen, if we ever manage to find out. But it is worth thinking and speculating about, based on a comprehensive assessment of all the factors which led to intelligent life on Earth.
So, I would advise anyone interested in the topic of life and language beyond earth to listen to the scientists. Consider what the astronomers have to say about exoplanets, what biologists know about how evolution works, what paleoanthropologists have discovered about how our special brains evolved since our break-off from the chimpanzees, and yes, listen to linguists who consider how language reflects the environment in which humans live and how possibly similar environments on exoplanets might, just might, give rise to communication systems which are in principle comparable to human language.
Carbon dioxide on Europa
The James Webb telescope, which has been in operation at a considerable distance from the Earth in recent years, has come up with new and interesting findings. The one which perhaps made general headlines in the media the most was the discovery of very large galaxies just a few hundred million years old, i.e. after the Big Bang. Normally, astronomers have assumed that galaxies require a few billion years to grow to a large size given that they do so by incorporating many smaller galaxies they collide with.
In late summer 2023 the James Webb telescope found traces of carbon dioxide (by spectroscopic analysis) on Jupiter's water world moon, Europa. This is significant because, on Earth, one of the major sources of carbon dioxide is respiration by living organisms (animals and humans breathe it out) and the decay of dead organisms. So it could be an indication that some form of life in the sub-glacial oceans of Europa could be producing the carbon dioxide which then escapes through vents on the surface. Just that, it *could* be an indication of possible life forms. More information will doubtlessly come from the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in April 2023 and from Nasa's Europa Clipper spacecraft, launched in late 2024. The journey to Jupiter takes about eight years (using the gravity-assist function by which a spacecraft flies by a planet and is flung away from it at increasing speed) so that the first results should be available in 2030, assuming everything goes to plan.
OSIRIS-Rex capsule returned safely to Earth
A small sample of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu was returned to Earth on 24 September 2023. The sample was collected when the OSIRIS-Rex probe, which had been examining Bennu for some time, landed on the asteroid and collected dust and grains churned up from its surface. On its return journey the probe released the capsule with the sample before continuing beyond Earth to complete the second half of its mission, to explore the asteroid Apophis. The capsule landed safely in the Utah desert and has been taken to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for a careful examination of its contents. The reason the Bennu sample is so important is that the asteroid stems from the formation phase of our Solar System over 4.6 billion years ago. If the sample contains organic compounds, or even amino acids (complex molecules consisting of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, some with sulfur or selenium), then this would mean that the building blocks for life on Earth were already available in the disk of gas and dust out of which the Earth later formed.
New books on questions surrounding possible exolife
The literature on exoplanets, possible life beyond earth and all the issues surrounding these matters, is growing continuously. A few new books appeared in 2023, too late to have in the references of my book, so I am including them here just in case readers might wish to see what other authors have to say.
Impey, Chris 2023. Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Frank, Adam 2023. The Little Book of Aliens. New York: Harper.
Loeb, Avi 2023. Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. New York: HarperCollins.
Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion
A new study has appeared addressing the question of why the increase in brain size with early Homo erectus began approximately a million years before the control of fire and the advent of cooking with this species. The time gap has long since been known as an issue requiring a satisfactory account. The following study offers a novel explanation – the External Fermentation Hypothesis – by postulating that early Homo erectus consumed food that was fermented, this providing an external phase during which tough, fibrous material could be broken down into a denser energy-richer form before its intake as food. It is postulated that fermentation sites were the caches used to store food over a period of time and that the fermentation rates increased through re-use of these sites. The pre-digestion effect of fermented food promoted the evolution of the large intestine with hominins: it reduced the colon in size, and hence used less energy, and with that came a corresponding – metabolically expensive – increase in brain size due to a more rapid processing of the nutrients in the food consumed by early hominins. The authors of the study thus claim that the consumption of externally fermented foods provided the initial metabolic trigger for brain expansion.
Bryant, Katherine L., Christi Hansen and Erin E. Hecht 2023. Fermentation technology as a driver of human brain expansion. Communications Biology 6 (1190).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05517-3
Unfortunately, this study appeared too late to be included in my book. However, there is a discussion of the issue of brain size and food intake, see pp. 216-200.
The following article, quoted by Bryant, Hansen and Hecht is also relevant in this context:
Robert R. Dunn, Katherine R. Amato, Elizabeth A. Archie, Mimi Arandjelovic, Alyssa N. Crittenden and Lauren M. Nichols 2020. The Internal, External and Extended Microbiomes of Hominins. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Section: Social Evolution, Vol. 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.00025
The above email address is that of the university where I worked up to recently. I have kept this email address because it is that which colleagues, students and others have used over the years and to avoid confusion I still use this and will do so (as long as the university in Essen allows me to).
The following images form a progression from the observable universe, a small section of the probably much, much larger actual universe, down to the small region in our Milky Way which contains our Solar System. The search for life beyond Earth is for the present restricted to this very modest region of space.
.jpg)
Evolutionary Biology
1) Do cells form spontaneously by organic membranes creating enclosures to contain relevant functional parts and establishing energy gradients across these membranes to drive various metabolic processes?
2) Do DNA molecules (or their functional equivalents), the carriers of genetic information, form spontaneously under favourable conditions (perhaps via simpler molecules as with RNA on Earth)?
3) Do cells maintain themselves and replicate spontaneously, leading over time to rise of a large biosphere?
4) Do cells naturally increase in internal complexity (possibly by incorporating other cells and co-opting them into cooperation as happened on Earth) leading over time to the evolution of increasingly more complex life forms?
5) Do the principles of natural selection and random mutation apply to biological systems on exoplanets?
2) Limbs with analogues to our hands showing a power and a precision grip. Otherwise they could not construct anything.
3) The ability to receive and process sensory input from their surroundings, at least visual and auditory data, though probably tactile data and possibly olfactory and gustatory data as well. These abilities would have arisen during their evolution.
4) Complex physical structures capable of the sophisticated computation which human brains achieve.
5) Conscious awareness of themselves and their surroundings with memory of their past and the ability to plan for their future. Exobeings would have the potential for learning and at least some of them would be curious to discover more about their environment and advance science on their planet.
6) A system for organising their thoughts and communicating with others which would be functionally equivalent to human language. This would be based on an evolved internal faculty which would be expressed as perhaps one of many exolanguages. There are cogent reasons for assuming that these would avail of sound, but other modalities are also possible.
2) The continuing evolution of exobeings, including technological advances, might have resulted in changes to their lifeforms into realms which we cannot imagine, for example, digital extensions to biology, which we have no inkling of.
Palaeoanthropology
Category
Occurrence
Some preconditions
1)
microbial life
common
cell development, maintenance and reduplication
2)
animal life
fairly common
complex cell forms
3)
human-like exobeings,
i.e. 'intelligent life'
extremely rare
a 'runaway' brain and manual dexterity
2) A round head without a bulge at the back.
3) Small mouth, teeth and jaw muscles, suggesting the consumption of cooked food.
4) Long legs, somewhat shorter arms, with wide-range joints on the torso; longer neck.
5) Manual dexterity with a power grip, via the fist, and a precision grip, via the opposable thumb and index finger.
6) Flexible tongue muscle capable of realising different configurations of the oral cavity. Lowered larynx with hyoid bone positioned for precise muscular movements to produce sounds. Agile vocal folds for generating voice, essential for vowels and many consonants.
Neuroscience
Type B. There is consciousness and there is a gap between what we observe physically and what we experience subjectively. But it is a matter of perspective: from the outside we see the physical brain, from the inside we experience consciousness. So we have two ways of thinking about the same underlying reality. This view maintains that consciousness and the brain are one thing in nature.
Type C: The gap is only one of knowledge and will be resolved sooner or later, scientists have just not arrived at the solution to this difficulty yet.
Language & Linguistics
2) It involves sounds with arbitrary symbolic value (with signing as a further modality)
3) It is used solely by humans
4) It is a rule-governed system which is open-ended
2) How language is related to our brains and cognitive abilities
3) How we produce language given our anatomy
4) How we acquire language in our childhood
5) How language probably evolved on Earth
Criticism
Now that's entertainment, for sure. But when seriously considering how life beyond earth might arise or indeed have arisen, forget the movies, forget the multitude of eccentric YouTube videos and all the lunatic-fringe material on the internet.
News
Link to Book
Cambridge University Press website
Contact
raymond.hickey@uni-due.de
