Might people be the dominant species within the Universe, and we simply do not know it but?

Within the universe of Dune, people are one of many solely species we see. Might it’s that we’ve developed on different planets, too?

The Dune universe appears to be dominated by a single species: people. Distinction that with, say, Star Wars – consider that notorious cantina scene – and also you would possibly marvel if Frank Herbert’s masterpiece is struggling to fulfill its range quota.

After all, the Dune saga is ready some 20 millennia sooner or later, and it’s not unreasonable to suppose that by then people could have travelled to each nook of area. However nonetheless, it’s a must to marvel the place all the opposite indigenous races are. Except the sandworms on Arrakis, and one or two different fleeting examples, we see only a few.

Might it’s that our species is the principal indigenous race within the Universe – that Homo sapiens, or one thing near it, has developed independently on a number of different worlds?

The late evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould discovered this concept preposterous. He argued that in the event you re-ran evolution right here on Earth – by no means thoughts on some bonkers planet 300 light-years away – then the chance of getting people a second time spherical is vanishingly small. His reasoning was that evolution is pushed by random units of genetic mutations, modulated by random environmental results, equivalent to mass extinctions, and that it might be extraordinarily uncommon for the very same set of results to crop up twice.

Nevertheless it’s a view that’s not universally held. One faculty of thought, referred to as ‘convergent evolution’, says that random results ultimately common out in order that evolution converges, tending to provide comparable organisms in any given setting. For instance, flight has developed independently on Earth a minimum of 4 occasions – in birds, bats, bugs and pterosaurs. Eyes could have developed as many as 40 occasions.

One adherent of this view is Prof Simon Conway Morris, of the College of Cambridge. “Convergence is without doubt one of the greatest arguments for Darwinian adaptation, however its sheer ubiquity has not been appreciated,” he says.

“One can say with affordable confidence that the chance of one thing analogous to a human evolving is basically fairly excessive. And given the variety of potential planets that we now have good cause to suppose exist, even when the cube solely come up the correct method each 1 in 100 throws, that also results in a really massive variety of intelligences scattered round, which can be prone to be just like us.”

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