Hang on, are human beings actually aliens – and not from Earth?

Anyone who’s watched even a few episodes of X Factor will have harboured this suspicion – but a new book claims that humans might actually be aliens.

Or rather that we were ‘planted’ here by an alien super-species – possibly for having done something really, really bad elsewhere in the galaxy.

The big clue is sunburn, argues the author of Humans Are Not From Earth. Why do we get it, if we were designed to be here?

There’s just one problem – it’s all bollocks, says the University of Minnesota Morris’s PZ Meyers on his Pharyngula blog.

Author ‘Ellis Silver’ – who says he uses a fake name to avoid being targeted by ‘religious extremists,’ said in an interview, ‘Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring (raw) foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more. Plus there’s a prevailing feeling among many people that they don’t belong here or that something “just isn’t right”.

‘This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species. One reason for this, discussed in the book, is that the Earth might be a prison planet – since we seem to be a naturally violent species – and we’re here until we learn to behave ourselves. (There’s no sign of that happening.)’

Meyers is scathing, ‘It is just the most amazing gobbledygook. It is true that there are sequences in the human genome that are not identified as homologous to sequences in other species

‘Biologists aren’t surprised at all by them. We have multiple explanations that don’t involve aliens making transgenic monkey men. Ian Musgrave has the explanations.

‘Some are artifacts — as I said, if you’re just looking for starting and ending punctuation, purely by chance you’re going to find strings that match your criteria in a random collection of letters.

‘Some are genes that have undergone so many substitions that they’re no longer recognizable as the original sequence. Those would be especially interesting in an evolutionary sense, I would think, but they’re rare.

‘Some are products of horizontal gene transfer. We don’t need aliens to inject us with strange DNA, viruses do it naturally.’

Read more: metro.co.uk

_{-- Delivered by Feed43 service}