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alisarae's review against another edition
I love octopuses and cephalopods and I have been wanting to read this book since before it was published. I had hoped that it would be more descriptive of human-octopus interactions—I could listen to those sorts of stories for hours—but it is mostly a textbook on evolutionary biology and the evolution of the nervous system.
Something that the author skirted around and didn’t even try to propose a personal theory is the purpose of the highly complex visual skin displays that cephalopods are capable of. Why would an animal with a 2 year lifespan, who lives a mostly solitary life, need to have evolved such a complex biological feature? He mentions a study that was published a couple decades ago that mapped the visual displays as a structured language. This study was largely ignored because of the way it was written (conversational instead of cold science language) and so the author spent little time on it. But honestly, that’s what I wanted the entire book to be about. These creatures possess the physical ability to have a language that is more complex than humans’ and yet, as far as we understand, there is no biological necessity for it. That is just one of their many characteristics that throws evolutionary theory out the window, and yet the author spent the entire book justifying the few characteristics that are easily explained. Sigh.
Something that the author skirted around and didn’t even try to propose a personal theory is the purpose of the highly complex visual skin displays that cephalopods are capable of. Why would an animal with a 2 year lifespan, who lives a mostly solitary life, need to have evolved such a complex biological feature? He mentions a study that was published a couple decades ago that mapped the visual displays as a structured language. This study was largely ignored because of the way it was written (conversational instead of cold science language) and so the author spent little time on it. But honestly, that’s what I wanted the entire book to be about. These creatures possess the physical ability to have a language that is more complex than humans’ and yet, as far as we understand, there is no biological necessity for it. That is just one of their many characteristics that throws evolutionary theory out the window, and yet the author spent the entire book justifying the few characteristics that are easily explained. Sigh.
janey's review against another edition
4.0
Okay, so the writer is a philosopher and I admit I don't understand exactly how philosophy interacts with the natural world but this was fascinating. He really takes on the question of the utility of intelligence in the octopus and never satisfactorily resolves it, which is how it should be. I'm just happy whenever I read about octopuses.
thechaliceofaries's review against another edition
4.0
We often think of philosophy and science as two very distinct fields that never intersect. To me, while the distinction is obviously necessary for all kinds of pragmatic reasons, science and philosophy are just two sides of the same coin; they are our attempts to make sense of ourselves and the world we live in. Although this book is primarily an examination of the evolution of complex nervous systems and what we think of as intelligent life, Peter Godfrey-Smith is also an academic philosopher, and makes a point to raise fascinating questions about what we truly mean by "consciousness" and a subjective experience. Of course, attempts to define such whimsical notions as consciousness have always been convoluted and given to interpretation. It's not reasonable to expect that these are questions with simple answers - however, I think Godfrey-Smith does a good job drawing from the works of various philosophers and biologists in his exploration of the origins of consciousness. There is an abundance of cool information about cephalopods and octopuses in particular that I think would be interesting to anyone who isn't familiar with these wonderfully sophisticated creatures.