Convergent Evolution on Alien Worlds

Science Fiction often shows us aliens who look much like humans, and suggest this is a result of convergent evolution to useful traits. But is such convergence to the human form or mind likely with extraterrestrial life?

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Credits:
Convergent Evolution
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 313, October 21, 2021

Written by:
Curt Hartung
Isaac Arthur

Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur

Editors:
Keith Blockus

Cover Art:

Graphics:
Legiontech Studios

[smartburning]

I literally laughed out loud at, "Clippy was deemed and actual threat to survival."

[pauldickinson]

“You there, boy!”
“Who, me sir?”
“Yes, you, good fellow! What day is today?”
“Today? It’s Arthursday, of course!”

[lllll]

the development of robots is a good experiment in convergent evolution. lots of teams working on robots capable of different tasks that humans do. their designs are sometimes similar to humans and sometimes not. one finding is that humanoid robots are only used when mimicking the human form is an explicit objective, and i think this tells us a lot about convergent evolution

[UrdnotChuckles]

I guess the blowfish giraffe centaur is now Isaac's OC.

[beefybutter]

I'm going to guess there are a lot of space crabs running around.

[Dragito]

I look forward to meeting our future overlords; the mutant centaur giraffes

[James-epbx]

The way I always saw convergent evolution was: given similar sets of tools, and similar needs, similar solutions are reasonably likely

[lancerhalsey]

Given long enough time, sci-fi enjoyers will find SFIA contents and instantly hooked up to them.

I found mine on my local imageboard in a thread discussing non-rocket launch when someone posted the Orbital Ring episode, subbed right away.

[christopher_paolini]

Isaac, thanks for the kind words! Really love your channel. It's a wonderful resource for any author, and especially those writing sci-fi.

[yeager]

I think it's worth mentioning that video games being effected by quantum randomness and atomic activity isn't unprecedented. As an example one of the most well known and controversial Super Mario 64 speedruns had a apparent glitch that saved a lot of time by increasing the players Z value significantly. This glitch had a 1, 000, 000$ bounty on it for anyone who could explain and replicate it, that is until someone fired a electron at the circuit board and got the same result. Now a days that glitch is considered impossible because the consensus is that a random energetic particle from space smacked into the circuit and flipped a switch at random.

[seb-fluffysnowcap]

crabification and stoatification are my two favourite examples of convergent evolution.

[CharliMorganMusic]

Order of Emergence:
Physics > Chemistry > Biology > Psychology > Sociology > Economics

[Shenaldrac]

6:00 "What does it mean for two species to be related?" It means they have to deal with one another at family gatherings.

[TheSkullConference]

People who say that there's no reason for aliens to resemble anything on Earth, I feel like they're not really taking basic physics into account.

[TheSkullConference]

I love the definition of life as "a system of chemicals that are driven by entropy to dissipate heat most efficiently."

[JulianDanzerHAL]

26:05
a lot of legal systems have, depending on the type of system, a lot of texts or laws in them that are literally just made completely meaningless by other laws but because they are meaningles because of other laws noone bothers removing them

[mikelfunderburk]

The many different times and types of eyes that have developed has always fascinated me

[ni-dirus]

Watching Isaac Arthur be like:
Minute 1: this video will be about convergent evolution
Minute 15: atoms are less or more involved in video games than you might think
(I love this channel and I always giggle at how unrelated some moments seem to be to the topic, that if you zone out you miss the connections)

[patricktoner]

I was thinking, we can see other galaxies because we are in a spiral galaxy, and can look "above" and "below" the millions of stars on our plane.
If an intelligent species was starting within an elliptical galaxy, so they were surrounded by stars, would they be able to see other galaxies? Could they theorize the Big Bang?

[smileyp]

10:25 finally! An aknowledgement that, yes human beings are, indeed, nature so what we do is natural no matter what that is. That doesn't mean it's "good" or "bad" but we can't forget that ultimately we are just an emergernt property of the universe and so is what we do.

This is important because it's easy to overlook, and has implications that can make life a lot easier for us if we stop acting like the universe is separate from us or we are separate from it