Spook-E - Xenomorphs

David Moscato (0:00)

You're listening to The Common Descent Podcast.

Will Harris (0:07)

And welcome to Spookulative Evolution. Hello, David.

David Moscato (0:13)

Game over, Will, game over.

Will Harris (0:16)

And hello, listeners, and welcome back to Spooky.

This is our annual Halloween special series, where we explore evolutionary science through the lens of monsters. We have selected a list of famous and characteristic monsters that we will be looking at from the perspective of how could an organism evolve to share or match the traits of this creature here on Earth under normal natural selection?

David Moscato (0:55)

Yeah, this is our fun little speculative evolution game where we get to use the toolkit of biological evolution to create some of our favorite fictional creatures.

Will Harris (1:06)

Absolutely. This is just for fun. We're not making any definitive comments or decisions on either how a creature like this would evolve, nor the fictional creature that we will be referencing. So don't come after us, nerds.

This year, our topic is aliens.

David Moscato (1:29)

This is an important theme because last year I did Spooky.

Will Harris (1:34)

Yeah.

David Moscato (1:35)

And now we're Will's back with a bang. Something, something to really sink your teeth into.

Will Harris (1:41)

I'm so excited. We have selected a list of aliens from TV, film, book, myth and games.

And we will be exploring them on how something like them could evolve here on Earth. We're not going to be doing them on their home planet because we've not been there.

David Moscato (1:58)

Yeah, we'll be addressing the same questions as always of where on the Earth Tree of Life might something like this originate and what factors environmental situations might lead to them evolving their particular characteristic traits.

Will Harris (2:15)

For this first episode, we will be exploring probably the most famous alien, the Xenomorphs, from the Alien franchise.

David Moscato (2:26)

This was rarely has there ever been an easier first episode of a theme than Xenomorphs. This is this is the place to start.

Will Harris (2:36)

These are the reason to do this theme, in my opinion.

So let's get some background and then we'll start speculatively evolving the aliens of the Alien franchise known as the Xenomorphs are those famous long cylindrical headed aliens that impregnate hosts with their young that then burst forth from the host killing them and grow into this adult that terrorizes people on spaceships and space stations and Arctic bases and all sorts of places like that. This creature was originally introduced in the movie Alien in 1979, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon, in which a crew of space truckers effectively get a distress signal from a planet, LV-426, and go to investigate where they find an alien derelict ship. It's often just referred to as the derelict, and discover on it a dead alien pilot surrounded by a bunch of eggs, one of which hatches and infects one of their crew members, which starts their horrific journey now that they have to survive one of these creatures. The design for the alien came from a famous artist, HR. Giger, who is a Swiss surrealist, and came to the attention of them because O'Bannon saw some of their artwork, and was like, well, this is horrifying.

And I think this might be good. So, got Ridley to look at it, and they looked through one of his art books, and found Necronom 4, which is basically the Xenomorph. It just has a more human face to it, but it's got the long head and the very bio-organic features that the alien is known for. And they said, that's basically it. Just alien it up a little bit further, and we're good. Geiger also designed the egg and chestburster, which is the form that comes out of the host's chest. We'll go into the life cycle in more detail shortly.

David Moscato (4:44)

One of the most famous and iconic scenes in film history, the chestburster scene.

Will Harris (4:50)

Absolutely. Geiger wanted the alien to be vaguely human, but as if it were wearing full body armor. So it has a human-like build, but is covered head to toe.

It has no eyes to make it more frightening, and so that you could never tell whether it was looking at you or not. To give it that ability that you never knew if it was paying attention until it was too late.

David Moscato (5:17)

Creepy.

Will Harris (5:18)

And one of the core concepts of this first movie, which leads into their life cycle, is that this was supposed to elicit the fear of alien interspecies sexual assault. And particularly what they said was, they wanted this to be a fear that male audience goers could also experience. So they made the alien horrific in that way.