Ian Holm other well-known film roles include Ash in "Alien", Sir William Gull in "From Hell", Father Vito Cornelius in "The Fifth Element", and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" film series. Holm was born Ian Holm Cuthbert on 12 September 1931 in Goodmayes, in Essex, to Scottish parents, Jean Wilson (née Holm) and James Harvey Cuthbert. His mother was a nurse, and his father was a psychiatrist who worked as the superintendent of the West Ham Corporation Mental Hospital and was one of the pioneers of electric shock therapy. He had an older brother,
Evolving the Alien Evolving the Alien Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life (published in the US, and UK second edition as What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life) is a 2002 popular science book about xenobiology by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart. The concept for the book originated with a lecture that Cohen had revised over many years, which he called POLOOP, for "Possibility of Life on Other Planets". Cohen and Stewart argue against a conception of extraterrestrial life that assumes life can only evolve in environments similar to Earth (the so-called Rare Earth hypothesis),