- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
This idea pops up all the time in pseudo-scientific literature, and while logically it cannot be ruled out that early ancestors to humans could have been socially or culturally influenced by an alien culture, we are not descended from aliens. We are too well established in the evolutionary tree of this world, we are not really all that different from chimpanzees, gorillas, or any of the greater apes. We do have greater cognitive abilities than any ape, but most species of greater ape have been demostrated as possessing the ability for abstract reasoning and mental representation. The we are different from apes simply in the scale of our cognitive abilites, not the presence of some intelligence that they are devoid of.
Biologically, an alien organism would have at best 1 in 4 chance of being compatable with our ecosystem; this has to do with the random probability of sugars and amino acids being oriented right or left. If I remember right, we process right amino acids and right sugars, the lefts just pass through us, an alien organism would face the same problem. Other than that, we are evolved very, very specifically for this ecosystem, we have developed resistance (and dependance) on millions of microorganisms that an alien race would simply not have. And splicing genetic materiel across earth species is ridiculous enough, but splicing genes from species from completely different evolutionary trees? And creating a slave labor force that is as intelligent as us? Certainly the construction of a kind of robotic mining colony would have been much, much simpler.
As a student about 3 weeks from getting a bachelors in psychology, I can tell you that humans do indeed think very similarly regardless of many siocal factors. As much as the nature v. nurture debate still rages, peoples reasoning abilities are pretty much genetic, we can train ourselves to think about problems in different ways, but we all start with the same basic reasoning abilities. Common examples of religious and mythological that persist across cultures could be explained by the cultural diffusion hypothesis, which holds that ALL human cultures are descended from a single common culture, that civilization began at one point, and spread from there all over the world. Any religious figures or beliefs held by that culture would have spread with its descendants.
Lastly, this article, and the whole website is dubious in nature. The only name or credit I can find on the site is that of one Jason Martell, who appears to be the webmaster as well. He offers no citations, no links to any of the "evidence" or "facts" he bases his arguments on. Its a fun, cool theory, but totally ludicrous.