SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel is a chapter in the book The Flamingo's Smile:  Reflections in Natural History written by Stephen Jay Gould in 1985.  Gould was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science who taught at Harvard and was an influential popular science writer.  Gould died in 2002. 

     The SETI program:  Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life.  The modern era of SETI began in 1959 with the emergence of the Space Age.  SETI sends out signals and searches for signals from other intelligent life.  The movie "Contact" was based around the SETI program.  So far it has not yielded any positive results of life in the universe. 

     Gould has no real interaction with SETI but has faith in its purpose, though he does think the chances of it successfully finding life are slim.  He wrote this chapter becuase of critics of SETI and their improper use of evolutionary biology against it.  He provides the correct use of evolutionary biology in refute to the critic. 

     Frank J. Tipler is the critic of SETI.  Tipler is a mathematical physicist and claimed that if life existed it would have already visited us and made its presence known.  He also promotes the idea of a "von Neumann" machine, a super computer with human like intelligence that would traverse the universe and produce copies of itself and inhabitants of a planet.  It could essentially populate the galaxy.  Gould found the idea of a "von Neumann" machine quite preposterous.  Tipler's evolutionary biology claim is that "evolution from a simple one-celled organism is so improbable that we are likely to be the only intelligent species ever to exist."  The "von Neumann" machine idea might have stemmed from this belief. 

     The question is then brought up in the reading that if intelligent life were to exist, would it be humanoid?  Gould states "No" and believes that humanoid form cannot be replicated again or anywhere else.  The correct evolutionary biology claim is that because of the events on Earth like mass extinction and the high improbability of events on Earth, the human form cannot be replicated anywhere else and any other planet with life would have completely different forms that we have.  The extraterrestrial forms would be an equivalent of ours, but not the same. 

     The reference to Casey Stengel (a major league baseball player from the early 20th century) is that he committed the fallacy of substituting classes for individuals in a pick of catchers while he was a team manager.  Using evolutionary theory to deny ET's is the same fallacy- saying that ET's don't exist because "humanoid ET's" wouldn't exist.  

     Gould's conclusion is that ET's could exist but just not in humanoid form and all we have to really know if they exist right now is SETI.  SETI is our only means of communication with ET's.  He states that the "von Neumann" machine is a good concept for reaching other civilizations but we do not have the technology for it now, if ever (which even Tipler agrees with).  Gould says he has little confidence in SETI finding any life, but does support it and says that if we were to find life it would be the most cataclysmic even in our intellectual history.