...to the ends of the Earth.

And then, what's even more remarkable, some of those ancestors turned around and walked home again, back to Africa. They returned the most advanced genes, selected to survive that epic walkabout, back to the fountainhead of the human genome, to be recirculated through the gene pool over and over across a million years.

It's not just that we started as walkers, but the genes we possess now tend to be the ones that hitched a ride with the walking gene. There's this whole cluster of compatible and mutually-beneficial genes that have been reinforced over time as a package, like walking and curiosity and vision optimized for the far horizon. This cluster of genes could be labelled "explorer" and "settler". It's what we do because it's what we've been most successful doing.

You're absolutely right, I've been thinking of the gene circulation chart when I use the phrase "go with the flow of the gene pool". Preeeecisely on target.

As to how this translates into an appeal for space exploration, my notion is that emotions are often the genes speaking to us, and if we invoke the emotions associated with exploration and settlement, we'll awaken the walker gene. And then we should step aside with alacrity lest we be crushed in the rush to the stars.

In the usual dietary-based classifications of types of living things, we're omnivores, and function more as predators than prey, and that's our "lifestyle". But I would assert that the walking explorer-settler is a distinct type of lifestyle characterized not only by our dietary habits, but our way of roaming around seeking niches we can adapt into to live...which style of living no doubt contributed greatly to the development of our intelligence.

To return to an older discussion on this board about whether aliens would really be alien, I submit that there are evolutionary strategies more likely to produce intelligence than others, and thus the range of possible characteristics for intelligence isn't the full spectrum of random genetic possibilities, but the much smaller range of random genetic variation filtering through strategies that favor development of intelligence.

Further, we're more likely to actually meet intelligences produced by the walker strategy for the simple reason that other strategies will tend to produce beings more inclined to stay at home. We're more likely to encounter walkers from other planets because they, like us, will just keep walking right off the edge of the planet.

So I still think that there's reason to expect that the aliens we meet (as opposed to all the other possible types) are likely to have comprehensible and perhaps even familiar minds.

Raoul asked a simple question, that's the answer he got. That'll teach him!