Was the human genome engineered by ETs?

The bottom line is that if you already believe that there has been an extraterrestrial presence on Earth for millions of years, then there is plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis that they engineered our genome, but if you don’t believe in an ET presence, the evidence won’t be sufficient to change your mind.

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Why are humans so different from other primates? A few decades ago — before DNA sequencing became routine — it was fashionable to talk about a “missing link”. If there are no surviving species that are “in between” chimpanzees and humans, perhaps the fossil record would turn up a continuous trail of variations connecting our species to theirs. The “missing link” is rarely discussed today, but the evolutionary trail has never been satisfactorily resolved. In fact, details of human ancestry remains a hotly debated topic among paleontologists.

Bonobos and chimpanzees were a single species until about 2 million years ago. Hominids had already separated from that line about 5 million years ago, but the differences were in body morphology, upright posture, and skull structure. Brain size of hominids remained in the same range as chimpanzees/bonobos for 3 million years, then exploded to 3 times the size between 2.3 million and 1.8 million years ago. Neanderthals held the all-time record for hominid brain size, about 8% larger than today’s human brain. Neanderthals gradually merged into our present species quite recently, just 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Today there are human races that have virtually no Neanderthal DNA, while Asian and European races are >2% Neanderthal. (Denisovans also merged into the human line around this time, but we know nothing about their brain size because no skulls have been identified.)

The rather sudden increase in brain size was occurring in overlapping waves in different hominid lineages. The short time interval raises eyebrows, but the diverse time frames don’t seem consistent with a single engineering event.

23 and you and me

Exhibit A for the ET engineering hypothesis is the fact that we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while all other great apes have 24 pairs. Our chromosome #2 shows vestigial signs of a merger of two chromosomes. In fact, the site of the merger is easily identified. Normal chromosomes have long chains of repetitive DNA at the ends — telomeres repeat TTAGGG thousands of times. In the human #2 chromosome, there is a place where TTAGGG repeats, and then it meets CCCTAA. CCCTAA is the complementary strand to TTAGGG, but in the reverse order. This is a “scar” from a time when a telomere of one chromosome was joined to the opposite strand telomere of a different chromosome.

The next logical question: How common are chromosome mergers in nature? Answer: they occur typically every few million years. The difference between humans and other great apes looks less impressive in the context of other primates:

Primate Group

Chromosome Range

Great apes

46 (human), 48 (all others)

Gibbons

38–52 (genus-dependent, extensive rearrangements)

Old World monkeys — papionins (macaques, baboons)

Mostly 42

Old World monkeys — guenons (Cercopithecus)

48–72

New World monkeys

34–62

Strepsirrhines (lemurs, lorises, galagos)

20–80+

All this diversity arose during the ~50 million years that primates have radiated.

Abductions and cattle mutilations

There is surprisingly robust evidence for these far-out phenomena. In case you are unfamiliar with Dr John Mack, here’s a Cliff Notes summary: Dr Mack was a Harvard Medical School professor with a strong reputation in academic circles and some presence in peace activism and psychological history. In the early 1990s, he became interested in the psychopathology of people who reported wild stories about being abducted by aliens. He interviewed hundreds of such people, and found, to his surprise, no indication of psychopathology in most. They seemed as sane as anyone else. Since medical journals didn’t want to be associated with this conclusion, Mack published his findings in two books intended for general scientific audiences [one, two]. Mack took the abductees’ experiences as veridical, but did not insist that the perpetrators were extraterrestrial. Nevertheless, his Harvard colleagues were sufficiently upset that they tried to de-tenure Dr Mack. He eventually won a court battle and retained his position.

Livestock mutilations are commonly reported throughout the American West. The phenomenon is neither disputed nor explained, so it remains a mystery. Typically, animals are found dead on ranches with evidence of high-tech surgeries having been performed. Sometimes, internal organs are missing, though no incisions can be found and there is no blood on the ground nearby. In other cases, surgical incisions are observed. Sometimes chemical analysis reveals substances that you would not to find in a natural environment.

Many of Dr Mack’s abductee reports include sexual encounters, usually coerced. Some of the livestock mutilations involve missing genitalia. This suggests that there is a presence on Earth of beings who are interested in human and animal DNA, and that interbreeding with “their kind” is an ongoing experiment.

This raises the question, “who are they?” and each of the possibilities is paradigm-breaking in one way or another.

If “they” are intelligent life forms evolved on another planet, we would not expect any DNA compatibility. We wouldn’t expect them to have DNA, or, if they did, we wouldn’t expect their genes to be decoded into proteins in the same way that genes are translated by life on Earth. The genetic code is assumed to be an arbitrary language, and proteins include a language of their own. Some of protein structure is functional in an objective way, but most protein structure is meaningful only as shapes that fit like lock-and-key with other protein shapes. So, if “they” originated on a distant planet, it means that there is only one way to design the biochemistry of life, and it is the same everywhere. This would be a startling conclusion with profound philosophical implications. Most evolutionary biologists think that evolution on Earth has been highly contingent, with many arbitrary choices that became biological fixtures only because so many later structures built on them that changing them would be instantly fatal.

In addition to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, there are three other possibilities, each equally strange in its own way. Maybe “they” are descendants of ours from the far future who have learned to time travel, and are returning to visit us, possibly to diversify their genomes. Or maybe “they” are ancestors from our deep past who have been hiding out underground or in Antarctica. Hal Puthoff has advocated this possibility, and coined the moniker ultra-terrestrials. (Puthoff has a past history working with American intelligence services, and has hinted that he knows more than he is at liberty to tell us.)

A fourth possibility is that “they”, the perpetrators, are beings that we cannot understand without expanding our ontology in one way or another — spiritual entities, inter-dimensional beings, or disembodied consciousnesses that are able to slip in and out of our solid reality.

Why would a Darwinian process lead to abstract thinkers steeped in art and science?

Coming back down to earth, we may ask, what is the provenance of the qualities that make us uniquely human? These, I suggest are

• Our capacity for abstract thought

• The symbology of language

• Our analytic thinking (science)

• Aesthetic appreciation (music and art)

Evolution, even in the broadest Darwinian sense, would not likely have found that these qualities contribute to survival or reproduction. Why would they have been selected? This, in my mind, is the most robust challenge to the standard hypothesis that humans emerged from our primate lineage as an evolutionary accident.

But, before we leap to the ET hypothesis, we might ask: Are our uniquely human qualities the only time in evolutionary history that qualities that do not contribute to survival or reproduction have been selected? Answer: Far from it!

The example that dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists have agreed to ignore is sex. Why should animals and plants be required to mix up their genes before reproducing? The “cost of males” is a factor of two by standard quantitative measures of fitness endorsed by the neo-Darwinists. If genes are selfish, why would they actively choose a 50% discount in passing themselves on to the next generation?

The link between sex and reproduction is very old, predating multicellular life. Many single-celled protists must share their genes (conjugation) as a cost of doing business. For the vast majority of metazoan life forms, sex is indelibly linked to reproduction. The fitness cost of sex is far higher than the energy burden of a big brain or the extravagance of being adapted for art and science.

Evolution of sex is treated by evolutionary biologists as a special case, a unique mystery, the “masterpiece of nature” in the words of Graham Bell. But an open-minded look at the evolutionary process tells a different story.

The standard version of evolutionary theory is about single genes that are selected in response to single challenges. But what we see instead is that life has a tendency to produce general responses to specific challenges, almost as if evolution were anticipating future needs.

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Parable

Suppose you need a part of a particular shape in order to build widgets.

The quickest and cheapest and most efficient thing to do is to build a mold in the shape of the part, and then you can make as many of them as you need. If evolution works the way we expect, she finds the shortest path to solving the problem at hand. Build a mold.

Suppose you were thinking way ahead. Suppose you knew that your company was going to grow and the needs of the company would change. The widget’s design will constantly be changing. Widgets themselves may go the way of the horse and buggy, superceded by the wadget, and even wadgets may become obsolete before long.

So you don’t build a mold. Instead you hire a team of programmers and hardware engineers, and you create a 3D Printer.

Your venture capital investors are screaming at the Board meeting — why are you wasting their money? They want a return on their investment, and they want it now. The 3D Printer project is a huge diversion. It’s going to take years, and other companies are getting widgets to market before you. Your company is heading for bankruptcy in short order; you will never survive long enough for the 3D Printer to be a competitive advantage. You are fired, and the VC mob hires a new CEO.

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In the standard version of neoDarwinian theory, natural selection rewards those adaptations that are first to the market. Evolution doesn’t “think long-term”. Evolution is motivated to develop particular solutions to particular problems because it is quick and efficient. If the competition takes the slow path toward more general, more robust solutions, then the competition will be left in the dust, wiped out long before their superior long-term strategy has a chance to show itself. Quick-and-dirty always wins out over the lineage that invests for the long term.

I have written previously about the research from the Tufts University laboratory of Michael Levin. What Levin finds — time and again — is that evolution has not taken the direct, efficient path toward the goal. Instead — time and again — the more flexible, more intelligent, more general solution has evolved. Presumably there has been a steep fitness cost for this initial investment, but the lineage manages to survive (time and again) long enough to complete the task and out-compete the branches that took the more direct route.

The take-home message from Levin’s work (in my words, not his) is that nature’s way is to create intelligent, flexible responses that will fit a broad variety of challenges. Levin demonstrates this by exposing living organisms to challenges that have never appeared in their evolutionary history, showing that they are pre-adapted for novel situations.

Conclusion

I don’t pretend to have an explanation for how this can be or a mathematical model for natural selection that would be a framework for understanding this phenomenon. But it seems to be true that life is an overachiever, and evolution has created organisms with more flexible, more intelligent responses than any particular case demands.

I repeat for emphasis: this character of evolution is unexpected, unexplained, even mysterious. But whatever is driving evolution’s propensity for “overachieving” in the direction of flexible intelligence might be invoked to explain the emergence of humans from a lineage of great apes.

Or our genome might have been engineered by ETs in the deep past.