a bonobo humanity?

I watched a video yesterday on those amazing sea creatures and was reminded of a couple of books I read a few years ago by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, and Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousness. Yes, again it’s about being engrossed and then more or less forgetting everything, so this time I won’t go on about myself and focus solely on octopuses. There are around 300 species of these shape-and-colour-shifting cephalopods, ranging in size from the Giant Pacific (the largest ever found weighing at about 270 kgs) to the Octopus wolfi (less than a gram). Which makes me wonder, how smart could such a mini-octopus be…? 

Octopuses have been living in our oceans for some 300 million years, pre-dating the dinosaurs. They are invertebrates, i.e no backbone, but they do have hard beaky bits, the only part that can’t shape-shift. They’re famously solitary, living in home-made rock shelters, or shells or crevices – in fact in all sorts of innovative hideaways, and they’re not very long-lived at all, for all their smarts. The Giant Pacific lasts about five years at most, others not so much. Basically, they live to breed, then they die – males and females alike. Talk about a mind-blowing orgasm. This is called semelparity, which contrasts with iteroparous us. There are sex-based differences though, in this senescence. The females guard their eggs for a while, wasting away and generally dying just as the eggs hatch. This wasting process is similar in both sexes (though sometimes the male is killed by the female), and is brought about by secretions of the optic gland, ‘an endocrine gland located near the optic lobes, between the brain and eyes’, according to AI, which doesn’t lie. Anyway, this death-on-giving-birth system ensures, if that’s the word, that every new-born octopus is an orphan. Nothing is learned from their parents. They have to rely on their own smarts. 

So what’s most interesting about them, surely, is the stuff that makes them think, from the get-go. It’s not a brain, in the mammalian or birdian sense, it’s a kind of decentralised nervous system. They do have a brain, of sorts, but they have eight other ‘arm-brains’. So each arm works separately but they must also be co-ordinated for the creature to get anywhere. Hard to work all that out, but then they’ve had 300 million years to do it. As to how many neurons they have, you can imagine, with the vast difference in species sizes, that it varies considerably. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about the same number as a dog, two-thirds of which are in the arms, the rest in the head. Nine brains, sort of. It has the largest brain-to-body mass of any invertebrate, unsurprisingly. They’re very visual, and can distinguish human faces, and even make friends with them, sort of. The award-winning documentary ‘My octopus teacher’ apparently demonstrates this (I haven’t seen it, but I will, and I’ve watched a documentary on the documentary, and even that was an emotional experience).  

So octopuses can be added to the list of smart, even super-smart critters, but there’s something very very different about them, it seems to me. They’re solitary, and this doesn’t seem to be emphasised enough. They’re orphans, effectively. Of course they mate, because it takes two, but they don’t have mates in the Aussie sense. 

Think of what this means. They don’t have parents, or siblings, or relatives – at least not that they know of, though the giant Pacific octopus lays tens of thousands of eggs before it drops dead. They don’t have playmates or teachers. Nothing is passed from generation to generation. Nothing is accumulated. They have no society. Remember the apocalyptically imbecilic remark of Margaret Thatcher, ‘there’s no such thing as society’? Maybe she’d mistaken herself for an octopus. For me, it’s due to the society that I live in that I can write on this laptop, or that I can read or write at all. Through my society I’ve learned something about the ancient Egyptians and Minoans, about Plato and Aristotle, about Voltaire and Diderot, Newton and Maxwell, Planck and Einstein. I’ve learned to play and appreciate the skills of soccer, pool and table tennis. I’ve learned of the joys and miseries associated with countless alcoholic beverages, and the odd not quite licit drug. I’ve driven cars, flown in planes, studied at a university, and sampled many other pleasures, as well as pitfalls, that my WEIRD world has provided. All, or most, of this stuff was around before I was born. They were the accumulations of our culture, part of what all we humans plug into. Octopuses, living and dying for hundreds of millions of years, have had none of that. To survive, they’re still doing what they were doing when our ancestors were synapsid tetrapods, likely sharing their oceans. And of course, they may well survive us. But have they had as much fun? 

References

Masterminds: Secrets of the Octopus (Full Episode) | National Geographic (video)

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of life, 2017