Afraid of spiders? And anyway, now you have another reason to fear them—thanks to evolutionary expert and popular science writer Professor Richard Dawkins, who said that aliens that can reach Earth might look like giant spiders the size of elephants.
Dawkins, 82, an ethologist and biologist who also holds 12 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, explained that the shape of the aliens that might come to our planet depends on the gravitational pull that exists on the planet on which they evolved. Speaking during an online Q&A session, he said that a planet with a smaller gravitational pull than Earth would make the life forms that evolved there resemble the evolution of spiders on Earth. However, if the aliens came from a planet with gravitational pull similar to that on Earth, they would likely look human.
It's all a question of (strength) attraction. Tarantula, Photo: Getty Images
"If we look at the life on our planet and the evolution that took place on it, then you see that with great frequency, evolution converges to the same solutions and the same form of evolution," he said. "When you look at the fauna of Australia, which would have been cut off from the rest of the world, you see striking parallels between this animal and the rest of the world. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to assume that living intelligent beings coming from an Earth-like planet would evolve in the same way we evolved and look very similar to us, and the same applies to all creatures that come from it."
The world-renowned expert, patron of the Oxford University Scientific Society who has won numerous scientific awards during his lifetime, addressed the possibility of aliens coming to Earth from stars with a stronger gravitational pull than our planet, saying that these "would resemble rhinos – but they would be the size of mice."
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