Friday, April 03, 2020

my childhood love

I grew up with the 22-volume Funk & Wagnalls Wildlife Encyclopaedia, a British collection of books about all sorts of creatures that walk, crawl, creep, swim, and fly. I also grew up loving molluscs—especially cephalopods, which are the subject of the Joe Scott video below. Quite a few videos on YouTube explore the question of cephalopod consciousness, especially as instantiated in the not-so-humble octopus, a short-lived mollusc (I spell mollusc the British way because, well, Funk & Wagnalls, and because the word looks somehow less literate and dignified when you spell it with a "k") that harbors an amazing intelligence that human beings are only beginning to fathom. Joe Scott spends a lot of time exploring the possibility that octopuses (which he deems the correct plural, not octopi) might in some sense be true aliens, given how separate they are, genetically speaking, from the rest of Terran life. Scott naturally concludes that octopuses aren't actual aliens, but they do appear to be quite foreign.


It doesn't take much brainpower to reason out that octopuses and other cephalopods evolved right here on Earth. First off: humans have been eating them for millennia. I'm no Star Trek-style xenobiologist, but I don't think it's possible to digest food that has an utterly alien genome. Second: octopuses and other cephalopods manifest recognizable traits and behaviors: curiosity, anger, excitement, agitation, stress, fight-or-flight, etc. Creatures from another world would doubtless behave in ways that are utterly unrecognizable to us, and in fact, Scott makes a point I've long made myself regarding aliens: how aliens look will probably be completely unlike anything within human experience. Even with "convergent" evolution causing alien morphology to share certain traits with Terran life (e.g., alien water-dwellers would evolve in fish-like ways to be able to move smoothly through a liquid environment), that's no guarantee that aliens would look like anything we have here on Earth.

Enjoy the video. I found that it took me back to my nerdy, octopus-loving childhood.



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3 comments:

  1. The Maximum LeaderApril 3, 2020 at 5:42:00 AM GMT+9

    For what it is worth, I have stopped eating octopus because of how much I've learned over the years about their intelligence. I think this is a not too little sacrifice on my part, because they are so damned delicious as sushi or grilled or in stew... The preparations are legion, and they are all tasty.

    Anyway... No octopus for me any more. I hope my forbearance will help me when their extra-terrestrial cousins come to Earth to enslave us all. (And I hope not feast on us "long pork.")

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kevin KimApril 3, 2020 at 8:28:00 PM GMT+9

    Yes... I often think that the stupid should pay the ultimate price.

    So you're still OK with the fried-calamari appetizer at Maggiano's?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Maximum LeaderApril 3, 2020 at 9:53:00 PM GMT+9

    I have stayed deliberatly ignorant of the intelligence of squid for this very reason. I enjoy feasting on their tentically goodness.

    ReplyDelete

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