Briboy -- the god you believe in isn't an alien? -- he ain't from here -- and the rest of that cohort -- all the angels and archangels, plus Satan and his whole crew? -- . . .
Wanted: Intelligent Aliens, for a Research Project
by Olivia Judson September 30, 2008, 10:42 pm
If there is anything living on Mars, it’s going to be weird bacteria or the like, not little green men. Which is a pity. Because what we humans really need is a group of friendly, intelligent aliens to study us, and give us a report on what they find.
The problem is, in many respects it’s difficult for us to study ourselves.
First, there are practical problems. It’s easier, for example, to study organisms with much shorter lives than our own: when organisms have short lives, we can accumulate lots of knowledge about them in a single human lifetime. Hence, we know far more about bacteria, fruit flies and mice than we do about elephants, giant tortoises or sequoia trees.
Another difficulty: it’s hard to do certain sorts of experiments. Many of the experiments we can do on fruit flies would be impractical or unethical to do on people.
But there’s a deeper problem as well: it’s hard for us to see ourselves in an objective way.
The literature from psychology shows that, as individuals, we are good at seeing other people clearly, but poor at seeing ourselves. Most people, for example, describe themselves as being better drivers than average, and consider themselves better looking than other people consider them. (The fictional 18th century heroine, Moll Flanders, recognized that a high self-regard can be dangerous, arguing that women who believe themselves beautiful are easier to seduce: “If a young woman once thinks herself handsome, she never doubts the truth of any man that tells her he is in love with her; for she believes herself charming enough to captivate him, ’tis natural to expect the effects of it.”)
In general, for “good” traits, such as generosity, friendliness, and sense of humor, most people rate themselves as above average; for “bad” traits like snobbishness and dishonesty people typically describe themselves as below average (less snobbish, less dishonest). Most of us thus believe we are less biased than other people, less racist, less prone to conform, and less prone to be influenced by advertising. Yet, while good at spotting bias and prejudice in others, we are routinely blind to it in ourselves.
These happy illusions extend to those we identify with. People expect that members of their own ethnic groups are more likely to smile (even in situations where a smile is inane, such as being alone in a room waiting for a computer to start up). Asked to pick out photographs of people likely to support the same political party as themselves, they pick more beautiful people than they do for supporters of an opposing party. In general, people tend to hold more favorable views of their “in-group,” to exaggerate differences with a perceived out-group, and to treat members of their in-group more generously.
When it comes to studying ourselves — to trying to understand how we compare to other animals on the planet — we run into similar problems. We consistently overestimate human uniqueness and underestimate the abililities of other animals.
On the overestimation side, we only need to look at history to see that humans tend to have any number of self-aggrandizing beliefs — we have a long tradition of believing ourselves to be the center of the universe, for example, or to think the planet was created especially for us. We often forget that for the first two billion years of its existence, the planet was home only to bacteria, and that bacteria make all other lifeforms possible: we are as dependent on the bacteria in our guts as a termite or cow. And when the chimpanzee genome was published, there was a big disappointment. The genes that have been evolving fastest between our lineage and theirs turned out not to be those involved in head size or intelligence, but those involved in reproduction and the immune system—the same pattern you see between any other pair of closely related species of mammal.
Moreover, in our assessments of other animals, we are consistently surprised. My favorite example of this comes from a headline in Nature a few years ago that announced that “sheep are not so stupid after all.” The reason for the re-evaluation of ovine intelligence was a series of elegant experiments that showed that sheep can recognize and remember other sheep. But sheep are social animals: they live in flocks. It would be astonishing if they could not do this. (A sheep newspaper would no doubt have run the headline, “Humans Amazed Again!”)
The idea that we need outside help in assessing ourselves isn’t new. The great 19th century scientist Thomas Huxley, in his classic text about the evolution of humans and their similarities to chimpanzees and gorillas, wrote:
Let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular “erect and featherless biped,” which some enterprising traveler, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum.
Huxley goes on to argue that only a human could deny the extraordinary resemblances between humans and their primate cousins.
Since then, the genuine difficulty in disconnecting the “mask of humanity” has grown more apparent. As we continue to learn about the inherent human tendencies towards bias, and the flattering illusions we like to maintain, it may get easier to guard against the problem, and to assess ourselves more clearly. Yet perhaps — probably — there are some biases that our brains have that we simply can’t see at all, blind spots that we, as a species, can never discover we have.
If any aliens are reading this, please make yourselves known.
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NOTES:
For a fascinating review of biases in how individuals see themselves and others, and of our blindspots, see Pronin, E. 2008. “How we see ourselves and how we see others.” Science 320: 1177-1180. For people overestimating their driving ability, see Sundström, A. 2008. “Self-assessment of driving skill — a review from a measurement perspective.” Transportation Research Part F 11: 1-9. For people considering themselves better looking than they are, see Epley, N. and Whitchurch, E. 2008. “Mirror, mirror on the wall: enhancement in self-recognition.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34: 1159-1170. For the quotation from Moll Flanders, see Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name; the text is available from Project Gutenberg [ http://www.gutenberg.org/ ].
For people expecting members of their own ethnic groups to smile more, see Beaupré, M. G. and Hess, U. 2003. “In my mind, we all smile: a case of in-group favoritism.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39: 371-377. The political party membership experiment is cited here, too. General attitudes towards ingroups and outgroups are reviewed in Robbins, J. M. and Krueger, J. I. 2005. “Social projection to ingroups and outgroups: a review and meta-analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9: 32-47 and Krueger, J. I. 2007. “From social projection to social behaviour.” European Review of Social Psychology 18: 1-35.
For fast-evolving differences in humans and chimpanzees being genes involved in reproduction and the immune system, see the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005, “Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome.” Nature 437: 69-87. For sheep being less stupid than we thought, see Kendrick, K. M. et al 2001. “Sheep don’t forget a face.” Nature 414: 165-166. (This paper had a minor correction in 2007: see Nature 447: 346.)
For the quotation from Thomas Huxley, see page 71 of the 2001 reprint of his classic text, “Man’s Place in Nature”; this was edited by Stephen Jay Gould, and published by the Modern Library.
About Olivia Judson
Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex,” which was made into a three-part television program. Ms. Judson has been a reporter for The Economist and has written for a number of other publications, including Nature, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Natural History. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College London.
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