George Simpson’s “The nonprevalence of humanoids” received mixed reviews.  Some such as John Pfeiffer disagreed with Simpson on almost every point he made.  Pfeiffer felt that if there was nothing special about our section of the universe then life should have appeared elsewhere in the universe.  He feels that if we find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, even if it is just bacterial life on Mars, that Simpson’s argument for improbabilities would be weakened.  The one thing that he somewhat agreed with Simpson on was that there should be sufficient funding for studying both life on Earth and extraterrestrial life.

            In contrast, Harold Blum agreed with Simpson believing that life on Earth was precious and unlikely to occur again in the universe.  He said “…there are good gambles to be taken close to home, and that some of these might even lead to clearer ideas of the odds of finding what we seek in space” (Blum, p. 614).  He felt it unlikely that evolution followed a set path meaning that humanoids were unlikely to evolve again.  He was clearly for decreasing the funding available to the space program and giving some of it to scientists studying life on Earth.

            Michael Halasz felt that Simpson made many valid points in his essay and agreed with him on most of them.  He felt, like Simpson, that we have been wasting too much money by investing in the space program and that we should take that money and use it to fund research about life on Earth.  He was not opposed to thinking about life on other worlds; he was just opposed to spending taxpayer money on investigating life on other planets.  “And Simpson’s essay itself proves that he does not oppose mental bioprospecting of the worlds, which costs the taxpayer nothing” (Halasz, p. 614).  Unlike Simpson he feels that it might be possible for life on other planets to develop humanoids.  He says “It is not inconceivable that genetic variability will be found to follow systematic rules when the point of view is enlarged from the ecological to the terrestrial and hence to the cosmic scale” (Halasz, p. 614).  He believes that evolution might follow a specific order or set of rules which would lead again to humanoids on other planets.  He thinks that since we are looking at evolution on such a limited scale we just cannot see the pattern.

            Leonard Ornstein felt that Simpson’s conclusion of the nonprevalence of humanoids was very reasonable.  He said “it seems reasonable to favor Simpson’s view that ‘humanoids are, to say the least, nonprevalent’” (Ornstein, p. 615).  He judged this from his own calculations regarding the improbabilities of life evolving in the same manner as on Earth.  By his calculations life should be even less prevalent than Simpson believed, and he believed his calculations to represent an incredibly fast evolution.  He felt that until independent evolution of certain human characteristics could be verified or falsified it was not a good idea to base important arguments in support of space programs on such evidence.