
The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why? - dnetesn
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/science/animal-intelligence-octopus-cephalopods.html
======
jaggednad
One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big
brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands,
there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that
energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better
grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do
with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for a creature with hands is an
evolutionary advantage, because that bigger brain allows complex behaviors
that can be carried out with hands. I bet octopuses are intelligent for a
similar reason. Its body is like one big hand, and there are lots of complex
behaviors it can carry out with those tentacles. Similar for its color
changing skin. There are many complex and useful ways that skin can be used,
so it pays to have a big brain. The important point is that the bodily
appendages came first, and those appendages made it actually useful to have a
big brain. I find it more surprising that dolphins became intelligent, but the
article is right that living in groups capable of communication and
cooperation can similarly make big brains pay off, because the animal can
engage in complex group behaviors.

~~~
Nasrudith
Well I think the bigger issue for gazelles is energy density period - brains
are calorie hogs and it doesn't take much cunning to track down grass. Grass
eating is the opposite direction in a food strategy - going for abundant but
low density food instead of chasing higher density.

A diverse diet is a bit of a hallmark of intelligence in itself in that they
are able to use their brains to get more food to make it worth the investment
- similarly to complex group behavior I guess.

Hermit crabs for instance are shockingly intelligent for crustaceans,
especially for ones of their size. I know that improperly shut lids which
while closed have enough play - they cold push from the inside causing them to
rotate on their axis and let them escape. That isn't quite tool use but
recognizing tools unlike anything in nature and how to manipulate them to get
what they want.

Hermit crabs have both and live in large social groups and eat a diverse diet
as well.

~~~
erikig
Speaking of Hermit Crabs, I was also blown away by their communal shell
exchange process.

Many hermit crabs will come together and work as a team to change shells in
hierarchy. If you've never seen it, you are in for a treat.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1dnocPQXDQ)

~~~
mcv
I feel like there's something taboo, something indecent about seeing a hermit
crab out of its shell.

That one crab was caught with its pants down for a moment.

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rland
Octopuses are really incredible creatures. They diverged from humans in the
evolutionary tree hundreds of millions of years ago. Our common ancestor would
have been a very dumb animal. Their brain structure is so different: 8 semi-
autonomous tentacles, with one sort of central coordinating body. What could
it possibly be like to experience the world that way? They're probably the
"peak" of intelligence with the most prominence, along with humans and
intelligent swarming insects like bees and termites. I think it's really
interesting. Is is it really possible to measure this kind of intelligence?
Can we ever know just how smart they are?

And, of course, they're just interesting creatures regardless. Their bodies is
flexible, yet strong, like one continuous muscle. Each tentacle has a slightly
different "personality;" for a single octopus, some of its tentacles are more
adventurous while others are more shy. They can change the color of their
entire body, and do, for reasons we haven't figured out yet. They mate once,
after which the female guards the egg cache without moving from the spot until
she withers away.

Everything I read about them absolutely floors me. They're the closest thing
we have to an intelligent alien species.

~~~
Latteland
I don't understand what the peak of intelligence means if that is termites,
bees, humans? What about dolphins, dogs, not to mention chimpanzees, other
great apes are likely smarter then them, but it will take some clever tests
and clever categorization of intelligence to understand their sense.

~~~
rland
The prominence of the peak. Like how Denali is taller than the mountains
around it, but Everest is still the tallest.

We're quite close to dolphins and killer whales, so the essence of their
intelligence is easier for us to understand, because they are more like us.

Bees, termites, ants, etc. are really interesting because any individual is
pretty stupid, but the entire swarm is complex and intelligent.

~~~
arcticfox
local maxima, in other words. Humans being the global maximum, on Earth at
least.

~~~
PakG1
Wouldn't global maxima simply be local maxima per planet? :)

~~~
wungsten
I mean, the planet is literally "global"

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11thEarlOfMar
In case you missed it, this out-of-the-water predatory behavior of an octopus
is astounding to us mid-west folks:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y)

~~~
mynameishere
Another vicious attack:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZbLFXqhbQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZbLFXqhbQM)

~~~
tozeur
Oh dear.

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nine_k
This is what a failed alien invasion / colonization attempt might look like.

A succesful splashdown, reasonable adaptation to the local conditions — and a
fatal flaw speeds up development enormously, bodies replicate and die long
before their brains mature. The culture is lost, the invaders turned into
animals doing primitive hunting.

~~~
stewbrew
Maybe they came from a gas planet and they came to invade the deep sea because
that's what home looks like. Unfortunately, these super intelligent beings
failed to understand that, on Earth, most of the fun happens on land.

~~~
Yetanfou
Does it? For us, certainly, but put all land-life on a scales and all sea-life
on the other side and it'd most certainly tip to the sea-side.

~~~
caf
This paper has some information:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506](http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506)
(see " _The Distribution of Biomass Across Environments and Trophic Modes_ ").

They divide biomass up into three environments, with 6 Gt C in "marine", 70 Gt
C in "deep subsurface" and 470 Gt C in "terrestrial". You can also see in
their analysis that the huge biomass bias towards the land is due to plants
and fungi, which overwhelmingly favour the land; among animals there is
actually more biomass in the oceans.

------
Animats
Octopi are interesting in that they evolved along their own path. The octopus
eye has the wiring on the back, where it belongs, instead of on the front
blocking some of the light, as most other animals with eyes do.

~~~
yorwba
They apparently also don't require crossing wires connecting each eye with the
_opposite_ brain hemisphere. Instead, the optic lobes are directly behind the
eyes: [http://cephalove.blogspot.com/2010/06/view-of-octopus-
brain....](http://cephalove.blogspot.com/2010/06/view-of-octopus-brain.html)

~~~
adolph
Also, their eye cells only detect black and white but they can probably “see”
color by using non-circular pupils.

[https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-
octopu...](https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopuses-
see-their-colorful-gardens/)

~~~
weinzierl
The article you linked also speculates on the main topic of this thread:

> Intriguingly, using chromatic aberration to detect color is more
> computationally intensive than other types of color vision, such as our own,
> and likely requires a lot of brainpower, Stubbs said. This may explain, in
> part, why cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth.

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steven2012
How does an octopus know how to match its body with its background? All video
I've seen have been with the octopus eyes up, it's not even looking at the
background, so how does it know a) what the background color is, and 2) that
its body is matching the background, since it's not looking at itself either.

~~~
megablast
They have photoreceptors on their skin too.

~~~
mcv
As if they don't have enough super powers already.

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tambourine_man
Perhaps more interestingly than why is how. Smarts are always useful but how
do they manage with such diferente and disperse nervouse system.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, _that_ is interesting.

Their nervous systems are more like spiders than vertebrates.

~~~
user982
Not that spiders sre necessarily unintelligent:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)#Intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_\(spider\)#Intelligence)

~~~
mirimir
I didn't mean to imply that. Indeed, Portia!

So if you love Portia, I recommend Peter Watts' _Echopraxia_ and (for a full-
length focus) Adrian Tchaikovsky's _Children of Time_.

~~~
finnh
Don’t forget A Deepness In The Sky!

~~~
mirimir
Wait. That has Portia?

[digs up his copy]

Edit: Doh. I last read that so long ago that I'd forgotten that they were
large spider-like beings :)

... and yes, they hop, so maybe Portia. But I don't recall that Vinge ever
says so.

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Shivetya
Interesting they say they are solo in this article yet we had articles posted
here about nurseries found where hundreds were together
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18335536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18335536)

~~~
kevinmchugh
There's been a couple reports of this happening (I think I've heard of exactly
2) and only in the last few years. They live very solitary lives, even if
they're occasionally alone together.

~~~
wavefunction
A couple of reports in the past few years and then you extrapolate that
backwards given that it's statistically unlikely to be a recent development
and you've got a pretty remarkable situation of communal nurseries over
millions of years.

------
stjohnswarts
I would like to keep one for a pet but they only live a few years. Been
through that with a rat, won't do it again; even kits and pups only last 15
years or so. too soon

~~~
user982
If you want an intelligent pet that will likely outlive you, get a parrot.

~~~
ams6110
Actually, please don't. If you want a pet, adopt a dog or cat from the local
shelter. At least they have been domesticated long enough that they are better
off under human care.

Don't keep an animal that had to be captured and removed from its natural
habitat.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Don't get a wild-caught parrot. There are plenty of parrots that need new
homes. Get one from a rescue. Or if that won't work (none close enough) get a
captive bred bird.

Also be very, very sure you can take care of the bird for the rest of your
life, and will have someone that can take over when you die who the bird will
already know and be friendly with. Birds are more work than dogs, they need a
whole room in your house (at least) to be made safe to fly around in / shred
things in, etc. Don't leave a parrot alone with anything you want intact.

All that said they can be very friendly & great companions.

~~~
colanderman
> Also be very, very sure you can take care of the bird for the rest of your
> life, and will have someone that can take over when you die who the bird
> will already know and be friendly with.

To be clear, the reason is that parrots bond (with their owner, if alone) for
life.

(Don't know why you were downvoted.)

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qwerty456127
Let me suggest a rather weird idea (I'm not really serious, but who knows...):
perhaps they have evolved to this not from more primitive species but from
less primitive actually. Even humans don't really need strong hardcover bodies
and strong limbs any more as now we enclose our bodies in all kinds of
environment suits, structures, and vehicles, all kinds of physical work can be
automated, all we really need is a brain and perhaps we can evolve into some
sort of cephalopods occasionally as some hundreds millions years (I'm not
really sure about the order of magnitude) pass if we don't go extinct and we
can also start loosing some intelligence once too. BTW this direction (to the
point of a rather-primitive amphibia) of human evolution as been suggested in
the 15th episode of the second season of the StarTrek:VoyagerTV show (an
episode popularly named among the worst although I find it being one of the
most intriguing). The Guild navigators from the David Lynch movie are another
clue, who knows what this weirdly evolved kind of human species could evolve
into to adapt when there is no spice any more...

~~~
fegu
For anyone looking for that movie, it is Dune. Worth the watch.

------
tim333
There must be a lot of luck involved in getting the right DNA sequence to
produce the right neural structures to get a smart creature. I mean lots of
dedicated computer scientists are trying to hook up artificial neural networks
to make them smart and are yet to get something with the general problem
solving ability of an octopus I think. Maybe evolution only hits on a working
sequence occasionally by chance and certain species get lucky such as
octopuses, african greys and humans and others like cuttlefish, turkeys and
cows were less lucky?

I sometimes think the account of evolution of man you tend to get in popular
science writing may have things backwards - it tend to be our ancestors got
good at hunting which allowed us to evolve larger brains but I'd imagine it
was quite likely that a random mutation made our ancestors smarter first, then
there were behaviour changes then we evolved some superficial changes such as
changes in size and shape of some parts.

~~~
speedplane
It's not luck, it's time. Evolution occurs so extraordinarily slowly, it's
hard to comprehend. People are trying to create intelligence a million times
faster than evolution did.

~~~
tim333
Well that's the usual view but it's based on random mutations so there must be
some luck involved. A change of the make this muscle a bit bigger type may
involve the equivalent of one bit flipping and so happen all the time but the
mechanisms of intelligence may involve a much harder sequence to come up with.
It's hard enough to program neural networks using code and tensor flow.
Imagine having to do it by giving the DNA code to make some proteins that then
have to construct an intricate 100bn neurone brain for you.

~~~
speedplane
You're giving far too much weight to "luck" and far too little to
extraordinary time-lengths.

Computers struggle to handle a single genome, let alone mix and match
multiple. And even when they do, it's a single organism. In nature, there are
thousand's of organisms mixing and matching, thriving and dying all the time,
spread over hundreds of millions of years.

No computer's bandwidth could come close to that.

But I have a deeper discomfort with your question. It assumes that the neural
network / tensor-flow model we use with computers approximates a human's. I'm
not terribly convinced of that.

Sure, human neuron's have are individually approximated by neural network
neurons. But concepts such as "instinct" are not captured well by that model.

It's weird that a newborn baby has seen far fewer colors, and patterns than a
well trained neural network, yet seems to know far more. It signifies we're
missing something pretty central to the model.

------
95
This scientific journal article suggests that

"The evolution from squid to octopus is compatible with a suite of genes
inserted by extraterrestrial viruses. An alternative extraterrestrial scenario
discussed is that a population of cryopreserved octopus embryos soft-landed en
mass from space 275 million years ago."

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961071...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798)

------
bePoliteAlways
Another interesting ted talk on human brain vs others:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so...](https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain/transcript)

It talks about number of neuron and why cooked food helps us in giving the
energy required for the large number of neurons. Also cooked food gives us
free time to think. (edited for clarity)

------
gcb0
because how else they would pilot their flying saucers to earth?

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-
sc...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-scientists-
theory-meteors-space-earth-cambrian-explosion-a8358631.html)

~~~
starbeast
What we see as an octopus is only a three dimensional slice of their true
form, obviously. They are actually a physical manifestation of the monster
group.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, and that accounts for the apparently short lifetime.

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hyperpallium
How much of an impediment to technological progress would not have being able
to tame fire have been?

You probably don't need the warmth underwater, but cooking facilitates
nutrient absorption ("exodigestion"?), wards off predators, post-sunset light,
and (later) smithing, smelting, steam power etc.

~~~
jlawson
I think the lack of thrown weapons would be more basic than fire.

Maybe even held weapons for striking enemies. You can't swing a club
underwater due to water resistance, and spears are hard to use well because
you don't have feet planted to transmit the force, so you just go backwards if
you try to stab something. Not to mention the lack of trees and branches with
straight poles.

Meanwhile stone tools and weapons are too heavy to carry. You'll sink.

In fact every tool would either sink or float, and incur huge drag. Which
makes tool use much harder overall.

~~~
insulanus
You could fire projectiles, like a blow gun. A poison-tipped dart could be
made to work underwater.

~~~
jlawson
Dart will stop within a few centimeters due to water resistance (unless it is
very long and dense, like a metal harpoon, but you can't make such a thing).

Poison will dissolve and drift away within moments of applying to a
projectile.

Nothing to make the tube out of.

You don't have lungs (water respiration doesn't work this way in any creature
I know of), so you can't "blow" anything.

~~~
pandaman
>You don't have lungs (water respiration doesn't work this way in any creature
I know of), so you can't "blow" anything.

You might have heard about mantle, an organ that distinguishes mollusks. Many
of them use it to circulate water around the gills and some are so good with
it that they can create a water jet and shoot it with such a force that they
swim in the opposite direction.

------
baddox
I’ve heard the same question asked about humans.

------
pishpash
The getting coconut shell part doesn't impress much. Even snails or hermit
crabs know to find abandoned shells to hide in. Seems pretty natural for that
class of animals.

~~~
phil248
I imagine the difference is that hermit crabs are exhibiting a rote, inborn
behavior that is universal among the species. Cephalopods apparently figure
this stuff out on the fly.

~~~
codeisawesome
Not to take away from this point - but I was always curious - Anyone have a
summary of how these “rote inbuilt behaviours” work Hardware-wise in living
things? Is the research even far along on defining and demarcating behaviours
easily based on this?

~~~
lawrenceyan
Instinctual responses are generally understood to be stored within the genetic
material, though I imagine like most anything, there’s a sort of continuous
distribution between instinctual and learned behaviors rather than an analog
black and white distinction.

~~~
codeisawesome
That’s truly amazing. So does this mean that .behaviour files are a common
format, and that, .braingroove and .genememory are “compiled” into this format
at “runtime”?

------
deytempo
3 hearts...It sounds like cell from dragonball

------
mirimir
> But Why?

Arguably, there is no "why".

You could say that they're an evolutionary dead end. But that's just
speculation.

~~~
mensetmanusman
Not sure why you got down voted. The ‘why’ does prejudice a creator :)

It also assumes free will in asking the quesiton.

~~~
mirimir
I wasn't thinking about the question of a creator, _per se_.

I was thinking generally about the fallacy of seeking intentionality in
evolution. There is a point to analyzing what happened, of course. It's just
that too much "why" is dangerous.

~~~
otabdeveloper2
> It's just that too much "why" is dangerous.

You're totally right. Asking questions and thinking about things might lead
you to dangerous places. You might even (gasp) eventually start believing in
God. That would be doubleplus ungood crimethink!

~~~
icebraining
Ah, but which one? You might start believing in the wrong god.

~~~
mirimir
I'm a fundamentalist. To the extent that I consider the possibility of
deities, it's the fundamental active/aggressive and passive/receptive
principles that appeal most. Plus some casual animism, I guess. Although I've
always been agnostic, experience with psychedelics has affected me. Plus, of
course, all the fantasy and SF.

