The Discovery - a short story about evolution

The Discovery was orbiting the G2V type star, hidden behind an asteroid to avoid detection by electromagnetic waves sent out from the small planet Sol c. Had the captain of the Discovery been an emotional man, he might have well cursed now that got the analysis from the computer. He wasn’t. He silently touched a button on his monitor to summon his son. The High Council had been right, there was highly evolved intelligence on Sol c. What the High Council had got wrong - it was going to end soon. All its calculations had been wrong.

When a generation ago his own father had visited the planet, everything had been according to the calculations. When the aliens had been detected six generations ago, they were barely different from their animal ancestors, but they had evolved a primitive culture. They were evolving fast and the High Council predicted that they could evolve intelligence and a culture similar to theirs in a matter of a few generations. Of course, that was relative, as the aliens reproduced at a much faster rate, one generation being approximately 500 alien generations.

The captain’s father had come back from the mission then. Everything had been according to their calculations. The aliens had higher evolved central nervous systems and more complex cultures. Of course, they knew that there would be mutant populations, they had factored in known unknowns. At the time there were two populations, one called Type A and one Type B. The vast majority of aliens were Type A and they subsisted on hunting and gathering.  The Type B population was small and apparently insignificant. They subsisted on farming and herding. In a way it was an evolutionary oddity: Type B had shorter and harder lives. Type B had evolved some idiosyncratic traits: they were much more hard-working, were able to focus on long routine work and in-group social, meaning they were more nepotistic than Type A individuals. Their reproductive success depended on high achievement, accumulation of resources and hierarchical status. True, they started reproduction earlier than hunter-gatherers and they reproduced at almost twice the rate, but there were simply too many problems with sustainability. The hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and only used the resourced they actually required.

When his son arrived a the bridge, the captain of the Discovery turned around. “We have finished our mission here, my son. We are going to return home.” His son, who was the navigator of the vessel, looked at him in astonishment - “How come? We have just arrived and haven’t even contacted the aliens, yet.” “We were wrong, son. We expected a peaceful intelligent civilisation. It looks like none has ever existed on this planet”. “How could our simulations have been wrong, father?”

That was one thing the captain himself was still trying to comprehend. How could they have gone wrong? They ran hundreds of simulations. In each one Type B was always only a blip in history. Type B populations were bound to go extinct. The most common result they simulations had yielded was environmental collape: overfarming, soil depletion, expansion and then hitting the boundaries of arable climate zones. Almost every other simulation had this result. The alternative results didn’t look much better. There were pandemics the farmers brought onto themselves by cultivating viruses among their livestock. Many simulations contained high levels of aggressiveness, either due to an evolutionary arms race of trait ambitiousness or due to overcrowding and starvation.

“Type A has almost disappeared and Type B is the dominant variation. They are highly aggressive, but so far they have avoided extinction”, said the captain. “How did that happen, father? All our calculations predicted the disappearance of Type B and the prevalence of a peaceful Type A”.  

How had that been possible? The computer analysis only made one possibility likely - hybridization. The unknown unknown. When the farmers expanded they didn’t push away the hunter-gathers as predicted, but they enslaved them. They kept them like cattle at first, then like slaves and finally like second class citizens. Throughout history Type A suffered high rates of mortality and their numbers steadily decreased. Natural selection went into hyperdrive and soon Type A had higher intelligence than Type B. They became for and more useful for the farmers as they started to invent vehicles, elaborate buildings and finally computers. The hunter-gatherers even managed partially to re-establish their egalitarian principles and the two classes slowly dissolved and soon nobody was aware who was Type A and Type B anymore.

Some hunters tried to rebel and establish completely egalitarian states and shielding them from the outside. These efforts were bound to fail because a completely egalitarian system made up of hunter-gatherers and farmers was bound to be highjacked by farmers sooner or later. As the hunter-gatherers had always had slower reproductive rates they were nearly extinct now. The aliens had two huge federations at war with each other. So far the hunter-gatherers had always found solutions to environmental disasters and conflicts, but with them mostly gone, impending doom seemed inevitable.

The captain told his son. “There are still some Type A individuals left, they could fix the current crisis, father”, his son replied. No, they couldn’t. Both alien federations were democracies and Type A were minorities. The majority of Type B individuals wanted war. The hunters couldn’t change that as egalitarianism was in their genes, but that also meant that they had become insignificant.

“We could warn them, father. We could help them identify Type A genes”. “No, it’s too late, they have been warned by hunter-gathers for generations. Plus they can do it themselves”, replied his father. In fact, the aliens had long invented genetic sequencing technologies. They could even identify hunter-gatherer genes. However, they couldn’t make sense of them. As hunter-gatherer genes often lead to neurological problems like autism for hunter genes and schizophrenia for gatherer genes, these genes were considered harmful mutations. In fact, the prevailing alien scientific hypothesis was that these mutations were accumulated with age as hunter-gatherer types tended to reproduce later in life. But these were increasingly rare diseases, so nobody thought it worthwhile to look deeper into the problem.

“Besides, the High Council would not approve of any kind of intervention, son”. The captain’s son sighed, knowing that the alien civilisation would be gone before he had the chance to return as captain of the ship. He would have to look for intelligent life elsewhere and start the search all over. He looked at the screen. There was an unknown word printed underneath planet Sol c.  “What does the word Terra mean, father?”. “That is how the aliens call their own planet, son”. His son sighed again and then he headed for Kepler-452b to take the Discovery home.