The thing that I keep wondering about is, why don't octopuses have higher aspirations? Like building octopus cities, and forming an octopus empire. Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation. Could an octopus be taught English?
As I understand it they have very short lifespans (3-5 years) and octopus mothers only lay eggs once. They die of starvation after guarding & tending the eggs right up to hatching.
I think they just don’t have the opportunity to produce culture. Maybe they could be taught but it seems like generational learning would be extremely unlikely.
Edit: their situation has always struck me as very poetic and sad. If they are conscious their existence seems so lonely. But maybe that’s just my mammalian bias!
Maybe they would be a better candidate for uplift than dolphins then? We could start out by fixing their lifespans (apparently it's a surgically resolvable problem, see [0]), and seeing what happens.
This remind me of a great quote from the film "Man From Earth":
* I mean,
assuming normal intelligence. Well, we think men
of the upper Paleolithic were as intelligent as
we are. They just didn't know as much.
John's man would have learned as the race
learned. In fact, if he had an inquiring mind,
his knowledge might be...astonishing.*
Octopodes may very well suffer from this, they may be very intelligent but just don't have the means to gain sufficient knowledge. If you think about it, take the average human, and private him from all of our current body of knowledge, and it will have a hard time achieving anything in earth's environment.
Anyone interested in thinking about this should read Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin.
The first is about the (accidental) future uplift of spiders via genetic engineering and evolution, the sequel about octopuses. The author does an excellent job of imagining how this might come to pass.
It takes almost 20 years for a modern human to become a productive member of society. In 3 years, we are barely able to communicate properly. Octopuses simply don't have time to learn and instead must rely on innate skills.
> It takes almost 20 years for a modern human to become a productive member of society.
The expectation of attending school for most of those years tends to greatly hinder the speed at which one can become a productive member of society though. Three years is certainly pushing it, but those in early adolescence have proven that they can be productive members of society, even modern society, if they focus on the right things.
We allow people to delay becoming productive members of society well beyond the time they technically could be productive because:
1. Thanks to modern technology, we now can allow it. Go back into earlier human history and not being productive in early adolescence means you would not survive. That is no longer an issue we need to worry about.
2. Since the above is no longer an issue, we are able to see the human experience as being about more than just being productive. We want to give time to explore the world in ways that is not directly useful, but enlightening nonetheless.
I think about this Douglas Adams quote about Dolphins a lot:
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal.
If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?
> Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction.
I disagree with this. Intelligence will only further survival and reproduction if it helps whatever selective pressures the population is under. Livestock are a good example, they were selected to be less intelligent. You're wrongly assuming that the goals of natural selection align with human goals. The only goal of natural selection is gene propagation. In this endeavor, chickens are much more successful. They outnumber humans, humans supply them with food, humans protect them from natural predators. Who are we to say "the only measure of success is a human-like civilization"?
Note that the parent did not say "survival and reproduction will select for intelligence". They said, intelligence if possessed will be put to that use. Livestock may be dumb, but males will still sneak out of their enclosure to mate with the herd, if they can figure out how.
The implication is that if octopuses could make technology, pass on culture etc, they would.
Right, that's how I read it the first time, and that's exactly the point I aim to refute. Imagine a sheep that is sneaking out of their enclosure. Either they manage to mate, or the human catches them and deems them too unruly to mate and a more docile sheep is selected. Either way, the enclosure is reinforced and unruly sheep are phased out of the population.
The most correct statement would be intelligence, if possessed && if it makes the specimen more selective, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. Countless animals don't rely on intelligence for gene propagation, and wouldn't achieve higher reproductive rates from higher intelligence. Big brains are resource intensive, birds and ants are doing just fine at the natural selection game without high intelligence, technology, culture, or civilization.
Octopodes have their own evolutionary barriers though, irrespective of intelligence:
- They only typically live 4 years and the act of reproducing kills them
- They live in coastal ocean biomes, which have high selective pressures
In order for intelligence to flourish, a form of communication is needed and the method to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. An octopus is a solitary organism, unlike mammals which are tribal. It does not live long enough to develop social skills or to transfer knowledge to their offspring, so there isn't any accumulation of information for their species to build cities or technologies. Each individual is forced to self educate and re learn survival.
Your criteria for intelligence is more criteria for safe habitat than intelligence. Just because they don't live long enough to learn language or write books doesn't mean they are not intelligent.
I highly recommend "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" for a fascinating look at octopus evolution and comparison to ourselves.
Octopuses have been around for 300 million years, I think they've got survival and reproduction covered at this point. I would be careful of conflating shared culture with intelligence, especially in this context given octopuses are mainly solitary.
Would they though? cities allow close contact often which allows disease to spread thus wiping them out. Eventually you create sanitation, medication and such. It is a long time from intelligence to designing sanitation and medical systems. If you skip all that by avoiding close contact...
If "intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction" were axiomatic, human populations would never decline for any reason other than accidental death, disease, etc. That's not true, however. As standards of living increase, birth rates voluntarily decline until populations shrink. People aren't getting dumber and somehow failing to reproduce as often, but instead are using that intelligence to choose not to reproduce.
This is a common misconception about evolution and natural selection [1]. Evolution doesn't have an "arrow", or direction, and it doesn't necessarily lead to any kind of improvements at all. Natural selection merely means that the least healthy individuals of a species will be less likely to pass on their genes. Intelligence likewise will not necessarily be put to any kind of use at all.
The evolution of human intelligence is still a delightfully big, open question in science, but the current thinking is converging on it being, well, as Bob Ross might have put it, a "happy little accident". Researchers have been able to track the development of the human brain through the varying sizes of a hole in fossilized hominid skulls [2]. Brains are massive caloric sinks and require a lot of food, rich in animal fats, to be able to develop. [3] Meanwhile, just a short time ago in evolutionary terms, humans accidentally developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood [4], and we got overall bigger, stronger, and healthier -- but our hungry brains also got a new source of nutrients.
The jury is still out on exactly what evolutionary advantage our brains confer, if any [5]. So, it is possible that human-level intelligence is not an evolutionary advantage at all. There are after all numerous species at the top of their respective food chains, evolving much more slowly, that could be considered successful in evolutionary terms. And, given the caloric requirements of large brains and the unclear advantages that they produce, they could maybe be viewed as a disadvantage.
If we were to view brains as, well, a kind of tumor of sorts, that will simply grow and develop depending on caloric availability, then perhaps humans developed agriculture because our brains were hungry and civilization because our brains got bored, and all of this was only possible because we accidentally developed the ability to digest lactose as adults, and none of it is a necessary consequence of evolution at all.
This btw is one of the major components to my favorite answer for the Fermi Paradox.
Well they have always been considered solitary. We don't even have a collective noun. So they may consider such things their idea of nightmare.
That said, we have discovered some areas where they gather[1], so it really comes down to us not knowing nearly enough. Much of life in the oceans remains a mystery.
"Or figuring out how to pass on information from generation to generation."
The marine biologist at a aquarium told us (semi-jokingly) that this is the reason they haven't taken over the world yet.
They just leave their children to their own and don't teach them anything at all. So every octopus born has to relearn everything and once done, they die.
Historically humans have asked this of other humans which typically are the darkest parts of our history where we devalued one another. Perhaps the Octopus is just happy with its lot. They also don't live very long only a handful of years, which is also testament to just how smart they actually are.