Paul Davies is a scientist willing to push some envelopes. He is also intrigued by the possibility of finding alien life. Those two combined led him to embrace genomic SETI.
Genomic SETI is a rather fanciful idea, but it has a foundation in fact and speculation. Let's assume aliens visited Earth before humanity arose; given the age of mankind against the age of Earth, and the age of life on Earth, that's a fair assumption. Let's further assume these aliens wanted to leave a message for an intelligent species that might eventually arise here. How would they leave a message that would last, perhaps, millions of years?
Davies and others, noting we've recently discovered most of human DNA seems to be useless, have hit upon the idea that aliens might have encoded a message in that useless part of DNA. Labs are in fact searching for such a message.
If such a visit did take place before humanity existed, of course, they would presumably have had to correctly predict which of the species around at that time would eventually lead to us. That would've been a trick nearly as good as interstellar travel.
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