Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business. Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

ALONSO: This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of. Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.

—The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1 

That's one of two epigraphs at the beginning of Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Extraterrestrials," by Simon Conway Morris. It seemed odd to me when I started reading the book, but it makes some sense now that I've made it to the end. Conway Morris wants (or needs) there to be more to this business than nature "was ever conduct of." This final chapter makes that clear, and by that I mean that it makes the author's desire/need clear. It is, sadly, a fitting end to the book.

Recall that Life's Solution, the author's 2003 book that made convergence a household word, is subtitled Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The notion that our species (or something very much like it) is "inevitable" is (in my view) a reasonable conjecture once one is faced with the pervasiveness of evolutionary convergence. I enjoyed that book when I read it all those years ago, and became convinced that evolution was not merely blundering around finding the weird and wonderful—it was algorithmically churning toward design, and then toward better design. I was then in a Christian world where it seemed that "adaptationism" was a Bad Thing embraced by extremists and (oh god) atheists, but here was a rock-star Christian paleontologist who was all in on adaptation. I loved that rebel vibe, then and now. But then, and also now, I was baffled by his apparent desire to be alone. Not alone in his office, but alone in the universe.

This odd preference is starkly incongruent with convergence and certainly with inevitability. To me, it was weird in 2003 to argue that we are both inevitable and universally unique. Today, now that our estimates of the amount of habitable space in our cosmos are vastly larger than they were back then, the claim strikes me as, well, a myth. Not a myth as in "falsehood" but as in an aging truism, linked to crumbling religion, that dissolves when immersed in facts. I'm not saying that I know or even firmly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists. I'm saying that human uniqueness is now playing the role of the old legend. Conway Morris (er, I mean Mortimer) wants us to believe that he's critiquing "received wisdom" but in this chapter and in the train wreck of Chapter 5, he's guarding graveyards of ancient dogma.

I couldn't read Chapter 6 without wondering what it was like to write it. Scientifically, it's weak and unconvincing. Sadly, the author subjects us to his typical disparaging and disingenuous dismissal of fellow scholars using the kind of "what a bunch of elitists" language endemic to the American Christian Right. (I doubt the British Christian Right is doing better, but I don't yet live there.) To try to make his case against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, he writes stuff like this:

As Dr. Johnson stated, "All argument is against it, but all belief is for it." He, of course, was talking about ghosts, but to invert his remarks the widespread intuition is that despite there not being a shred of evidence there must be extraterrestrials. (pp. 209-210)

Let's think about what we just read. The author repurposes a quote about ghosts, using the phrase "not being a shred of evidence," as a Christian who is about to discuss the paranormal in a book that claims to be critical of "myths." No irony meter could withstand this, so please use caution if you intend to read it aloud.

Right after that, he is forced to admit that "the vital statistics appear to be on the side of the believers." He spends much of the following section(s) reprising the "yes but" rejoinders to science, the ones that made Chapter 5 a convincing argument against ever reading his writing again. The topic is the so-called Fermi Paradox, maybe better phrased as a question: Where are they?

I can confirm there is no "myth" here, nor is there clear orthodoxy. Writings about the question are necessarily speculative and seem to span the spectrum of possible positions, from "seems very likely they're out there" to "I think we're alone." When Conway Morris described one position as "home to all those bien-pensants, their reassuring murmur arising from the university faculty clubs, North Oxford, and other zones of intellectual rectitude," he finalized (for me) his status as a disgrace.

The rest of the chapter is about what I will call the paranormal, because Conway Morris calls it the paranormal and because it is the paranormal. Uber kooky. Complete with a few of his signature sneers at "the materialists," the sections are unworthy of further comment. The book ends with a coda that includes our old marionette Mortimer. I was just so happy to be done.

My first thought was to let Hippolyta have the last word, since I so love A Midsummer Night's Dream:

DEMETRIUS: No remedy, my lord, when walls are so willful to hear without warning.
HIPPOLYTA:  This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1

But I think it best to let the Bard finish the conversation that Conway Morris started with. That expression of wonderment by Alonso, above, was answered by Prospero thus:

PROSPERO:  Sir, my liege,
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business.

—The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

There. I drank the whole potion and have survived. My last post in this series will include some general thoughts and responses.

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Image credit:  Prospero and Ariel (from Shakespeare's The Tempest), 1797 by William Hamilton. From Wikipedia.