Many times the human species has travelled into space, only to find the stars inhabited by aliens who look remarkably like humans in funny suits - or even humans with a touch of makeup and latex - or just beige Caucasians in fee simple.

It's remarkable how the human form is the natural baseline of the universe, from which all other alien species are derived via a few modifications.

What could possibly explain this fascinating phenomenon? Convergent evolution, of course! Even though these alien lifeforms evolved on a thousand alien planets, completely independently from Earthly life, they all turned out the same.

Don't be fooled by the fact that a kangaroo (a mammal) resembles us rather less than does a chimp (a primate), nor by the fact that a frog (amphibians, like us, are tetrapods) resembles us less than the kangaroo. Don't be fooled by the bewildering variety of the insects, who split off from us even longer ago than the frogs; don't be fooled that insects have six legs, and their skeletons on the outside, and a different system of optics, and rather different sexual practices.

You might think that a truly alien species would be more different from us than we are from insects - that the aliens wouldn't run on DNA, and might not be made of folded-up hydrocarbon chains internally bound by van der Waals forces (aka proteins).

As I said, don't be fooled. For an alien species to evolve intelligence, it must have two legs with one knee each attached to an upright torso, and must walk in a way similar to us. You see, any intelligence needs hands, so you've got to repurpose a pair of legs for that - and if you don't start with a four-legged being, it can't develop a running gait and walk upright, freeing the hands.

For an alien species to evolve intelligence it needs binocular vision for precise manipulation, which means exactly two eyes. These eyes must be located in a head atop a torso. The alien must communicate by transcoding their thoughts into acoustic vibrations, so they need ears and lips and a throat. And think of how out-of-place ears and eyes and lips would look, without a nose! Sexual selection will result in the creation of noses - you wouldn't want to mate with something without a face, would you? A similar logic explains why the female of the species is invariably attractive - ugly aliens wou

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