Alien Atrophy

Two assumptions are generally made about the grey aliens who supposedly infest our skies. Firstly, they are a much older race than we are. And secondly, they are in a state of physical atrophy. Only by breeding with us can they escape their evolutionary dead end.

At first sight, these assumptions appear to be mutually supportive. Because the greys are more technologically advanced than us, they must have existed for far longer. Because they have existed for far longer, they must be more highly evolved. And being more highly evolved naturally means having a huge head and a tiny body. Some writers have even speculated that the greys may be our own future selves.

The Speed of Progress

Modern man - Homo Sapiens - first emerged in Africa roughly 195,000 years ago. However, the first truly modern civilisation arose only 5500 years ago in Mesopotamia. If, by way of analogy, we imagine that modern Man has lived for a single day, then he only invented civilisation half-an-hour ago.

We should not assume that an alien race would be so tardy in moving out of the Stone Age. Imagine an alien race equivalent to Homo Sapiens that emerged 100,000 years ago, yet took only 50,000 years to develop their first civilisation. Despite being only half our age, they would now be the equivalent of 45,000 years ahead of us. And if they were more intelligent than us, they might be even further ahead.

Evolution, Captain Comet and Mr Wells

The greys, it is often said, are a dying race, who have accelerated their own evolution with disastrous consequences. In an alternative scenario, the greys are said to be over-evolved humans from the far future. In either case, the assumption seems to be that an increase in intelligence will inevitably be offset by a severe deterioration in physical condition.

The process is illustrated rather neatly by this cover illustration (right) from a 1954 issue of the pulp Strange Adventures. Here we see a giant alien brain firing his "evolution ray" at Captain Comet. As the Captain undergoes centuries of evolution in the space of seconds, his limbs and torso shrink while his brain expands. Simultaneously, his sportswear metamorphosises into a tight one-piece jumpsuit.

The roots of this portrayal of Mankind's future evolution can be found in the early works of HG Wells. In War of the Worlds, the invading Martians are depicted as little more than giant heads with tentacles. "The Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body," writes the narrator. The Martians relied on machines to fulfil the function of their atrophied limbs and were quite helpless without them.

In The Time Machine, an over-reliance on technology leads to a similar physical deterioration in mankind. The Time Traveller visits the far future to discover that the human race has split into two subspecies. The Eloi - who live above ground - are only 4 feet high and "indescribably frail". Differences between the sexes have all but disappeared in them. The subterranean Morlocks are equally frail, but even less human. They are "nauseatingly inhuman" creatures with white skin and "abnormally large" lidless eyes.

Mankind's deterioration is not just physical but mental too. The Time Traveller judges the Eloi to have the intellectual capacity of 5-year-old children. He presumes that the creation of a technological Utopia in which Mankind no longer had to struggle to survive ultimately precipitated our downfall. "The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence," he surmises. In this, Wells's thinking is far closer to Lamarck's than Darwin's.

Lamarckian Inheritance

Lamarck (1744-1829) proposed that species evolved by way of acquired characteristics. For example, as Giraffes constantly stretched to reach leaves on the tops of trees, their necks physically lengthened. Their offspring inherited the longer neck and stretched it still further. Conversely, if Giraffes were to allow their necks to atrophy, then their offspring would inherit weakened necks. "The influence of a predominant use or constant disuse of an organ or part, is conserved through generation in the new individuals descending from them," he wrote in his Zoological Philosophy.

Thus, Martians who exercised their intellect but allowed their limbs to fall into disuse would evolve into giant brains with useless vestigial limbs. Humans who allowed both their limbs and their brains to fall into disuse would grow both physically and mentally feeble. Eventually they would regress to that nightmarish form glimpsed by the Traveller during his brief visit to Earth's most distant future - a "round thing" with tentacles "hopping fitfully about" on a beach.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is rather different. Darwin proposed that spontaneous mutations occasionally arose in offspring that happened to increase their chances of survival. Over time, those offspring with the mutation survived at the expense of those without. Evolution is therefore always progressive, not regressive. The fact that you spend your entire life as a couch potato does not mean that your offspring will inherit your weakened limbs.

Twilight of the Gods

The fragile aliens of contemporary mythology owe much to Lamarck and his influence, through Wells, on pulp science fiction. As a race, they are ancient, feeble, and slipping inexorably into collective senility. Their power derives solely from their technology. They are already half dead, and like Wells's over-evolved Martians who inject themselves with our blood, they can only survive by preying upon younger, more vital species.

Despite significant changes in lifestyle over the past 200,000 years, Homo Sapiens has changed little since he first emerged from Africa. It seems unlikely that our increasing reliance on technology will inevitably doom us to a future as decrepit midgets with oversized heads. Indeed, rather than shrinking, we are becoming increasingly obese as we become increasingly sedentary. A pessimist might predict that future humans are more likely to resemble Jabba the Hutt than the spindly space embryos of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Lamarck's theories have not been taken seriously in evolutionary biology for well over a century. That they still survive in Ufology is testament to the fact that, for all its pseudo-scientific trimmings, Ufology has very little in common with true science. It is a faith, and like all faiths, it is dependent upon narrative power rather than prosaic fact.