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A review by alisarae
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
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.