Band of Brothers
One of the hardest things about creating SF aliens is giving them an alien psychology. There seem to be three main approaches to this, none of them very satisfactory. The first is to use some kind of stereotyped culture, like all those catlike aliens with their honourable warriors. The second is to create an wonderfully bizarre psychology that would give the aliens problems dealing with the physical universe, let alone developing any technology. The third approach is not to bother at all, having even creatures as weird as Mesklinites think and behave like contemporary Americans.
An alien psychology should develop naturally out of the biology of the alien, although hopefully not as crudely as having herbivores that are natural cowards. In connection with this I've been thinking about altruism. Human beings have a tendency to trust strangers and help them at their own expense. There are game-theory reasons why they might do this, all the iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas that make up modern life. But humans seem to go beyond rational calculation and help people when they know there can't be any payoff. There's an evolutionary explanation for this that's been outlined most clearly by Richard Dawkins. It makes evolutionary sense to help out your relatives, because they share genes in common with you. But the human race has evolved while living in small, isolated groups mostly made up of relatives. Rather than go through complicated calculations of relatedness, in that situation it's easier to just help any human being you come across. They'll probably be related to you in some way, and if not you haven't lost much. This strategy doesn't work if you live in a city with thousands of unrelated people, but the evolution of our behaviour hasn't adjusted to that yet. We should hope it doesn't.
Imagine an intelligent alien that evolved surrounded by lots of unrelated members of its own species. It could have reached the stage of agriculture and cities and stagnated there for a million years, becoming as adapted to unrelated crowds as humans are to a band of hunter-gatherers. Or it could just be the equivalent of a gull that nests among thousands of other gulls. Under those conditions, evolution would select against any kind of altruism outside the alien's relatives, and for elaborate methods to detect degrees of relatedness.
This sounds like a classic "evil" alien, quite willing to rob, enslave, or kill any other member of its species as long as the payoff is enough. But most of what humans think of as evil involves self-sacrifice for a group that would be impossible for these aliens. They probably wouldn't bother to round up and gas specific ethnic groups: what's in it for them, and who's paying for the gas? And they certainly won't hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Also unlike most evil aliens in SF, they won't be xenophobic. Sure, they'd slit the throat of any human for a nickel, and expect us to do the same. But the same goes for the other aliens they ride with to work, and the mechanisms they use to get on with them can easily be applied to humans. Like Homer Simpson avoiding jury duty, they're prejudiced against all races.
An alien psychology should develop naturally out of the biology of the alien, although hopefully not as crudely as having herbivores that are natural cowards. In connection with this I've been thinking about altruism. Human beings have a tendency to trust strangers and help them at their own expense. There are game-theory reasons why they might do this, all the iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas that make up modern life. But humans seem to go beyond rational calculation and help people when they know there can't be any payoff. There's an evolutionary explanation for this that's been outlined most clearly by Richard Dawkins. It makes evolutionary sense to help out your relatives, because they share genes in common with you. But the human race has evolved while living in small, isolated groups mostly made up of relatives. Rather than go through complicated calculations of relatedness, in that situation it's easier to just help any human being you come across. They'll probably be related to you in some way, and if not you haven't lost much. This strategy doesn't work if you live in a city with thousands of unrelated people, but the evolution of our behaviour hasn't adjusted to that yet. We should hope it doesn't.
Imagine an intelligent alien that evolved surrounded by lots of unrelated members of its own species. It could have reached the stage of agriculture and cities and stagnated there for a million years, becoming as adapted to unrelated crowds as humans are to a band of hunter-gatherers. Or it could just be the equivalent of a gull that nests among thousands of other gulls. Under those conditions, evolution would select against any kind of altruism outside the alien's relatives, and for elaborate methods to detect degrees of relatedness.
This sounds like a classic "evil" alien, quite willing to rob, enslave, or kill any other member of its species as long as the payoff is enough. But most of what humans think of as evil involves self-sacrifice for a group that would be impossible for these aliens. They probably wouldn't bother to round up and gas specific ethnic groups: what's in it for them, and who's paying for the gas? And they certainly won't hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Also unlike most evil aliens in SF, they won't be xenophobic. Sure, they'd slit the throat of any human for a nickel, and expect us to do the same. But the same goes for the other aliens they ride with to work, and the mechanisms they use to get on with them can easily be applied to humans. Like Homer Simpson avoiding jury duty, they're prejudiced against all races.