Cephalopodial fun and games
Octopi, if you don't know, are considered extremely intelligent by marine scientists. Perhaps that isn't so surprising: they are all head (he wrote with his tongue in his cheek, which was in a head that was not a foot.)
I wonder how Louis feels about the toy, how he perceives it; it's an interesting and unanswerable philosophical question. While it's a mistake to anthropomorphize non-human animals, I suspect you can go too far in the opposite direction--the brains of humans and of our cousins vary in degree more than they vary in kind. My cat, Elvis', brain may be walnut-sized, but it contains the same pieces that my brain does. It may be illogical to assume my cat can feel love, but it's just as illogical to conclude that my cat has no emotional landscape.
Cats, however, are cousins, albeit distant ones: we share a common vertebrate ancestor who had an even cruder, less-differentiated version of our brain--the Model A version of our brain, if you will (perhaps that makes Elvis' brain a Yugo and mine a high-performance Lamborghini, for the sake of an already-strained metaphor). But the octopus is hardly related to my cat and I at all: his ancestry branched from Elvis' and mine something like 570,000,000 years ago. The things about Louis the octopus that are superficially similar--his brain and eyes--evolved completely independently of my brain and the Elf-cat's brain.
In a very real way, Louis is an alien brain--perhaps an alien intelligence, if that last word means anything when discussing a mollusk. What does he see when he looks at his Potato Head? What does he feel, if anything? And how would we ever know? And if we can't get inside the head of an extremely different terrestrial brain, could we ever have any hope of understanding an extraterrestrial one if we ever came across it?
Anyway, enough navel-gazing and idle, circular rumination. Let's close with a much more pedestrian thought: there's something kinda cute about a cephalopod and his doll:
Long life, Louis, and I may there always be plenty of tasty crabmeat in Mr. Potato Head's storage compartment.
Comments
about animal intelligence. my dog dreams. he has really intense dreams and begins twitching and barking in his sleep and sometimes he growls. so i read a little about dogs and dreaming, and it seems that he is, in fact, dreaming if dreaming is just our brain's way of filing information away into compartments and organizing thoughts. then i started to notice something really interesting about this theory. i've made the observation that he seems to dream after a day of intense playing at the dog park, which would make sense because his little walnut brain has just taken in a lot of new information that day. thus, the file storing.
Seriously: I think that's the really interesting question. Our brains branched from the top--our ancestor had a tuft of sensory and motor nerves up at one end that kept getting bigger and bigger over successive iterations until the most recent models can dream of sniffing another dog's ass in the park or landing on the moon. However, the octopus brain (from what I understand) evolved from several separate clusters of motor ganglia that eventually cross-wired into each other. The evolution of vertebrate brains and the evolution of mollusc brains had absolutely nothing to do with each other. You and Oscar and I have far more in common with each other and with frogs than any of us (people, dog and frogs) have in common with Louis the octopus.
And yet this radically-different creature appears to engage his toy--I mean, the mind kind of boggles. Or at least mine does.
And here's a related question: do octopi dream? It makes sense that dogs and people dream--again, we're distant cousins with a common ancestor not that far back. (I don't feel like looking it up right now, but our common ancestor was what, fifty, sixty million years back, maybe? Someone feel free to chime in if you know.) But--again--we have almost nothing in common with Mr. Octopus. Our last common ancestor was somewhere half-a-billion years ago.
It's amazing, really. And such a seemingly-small thing, an octopus with a toy.
Regardless of how far unrelated humans, dogs, and octopi are to each other, we all evolved on the same planet under the same pressures. There's more than one way to pick up a stick, but every way still has to end up with picking up the stick. Life may have come up with a very wide variety of ways to cope with those pressures, but regardless of the exact paths, the end resulting actions and reactions will still be the same.
Disclaimer: this is just me blathering my thoughts with no actual facts or evidence to back me up.
What's interesting with the mollusc brain, as I've noted, is that there's no common ancestor of mammal and mollusc that has a brain. These brains are also an example of convergent evolution, and like other examples of convergent evolution, the brains of mammals and molluscs evolved into similar forms out of different structures. And this raises some interesting philosophical questions about how two creatures alien to each other might see the world: do octopi and dogs actually think the same way if the mechanics of thought are different?
I think there's also an interesting question buried here about synergy or secondary functioning: does "play" (for instance) serve an evolutionary purpose or is it a secondary outcome of having a brain that has evolved to handle other complexities: sensory acuity, for instance?
By way of a crude analogy: an information network that has evolved to allow physicists to send nuclear bomb data to each other might also be admirably suited to allowing them to send porn to one another. The secondary function (porn) is an incidental byproduct of the primary functioning (transmitting scientific data).
One reason I find these questions interesting--and I suspect this is something we have in common, MWT--is that I'm a science fiction geek. We wonder what a creature that independently evolved on a distant planet might be like--well here's a product of independent evolution in a fishtank. The fact that such a creature plays isn't dispositive of what a brain on a small planet near Tau Ceti does, but it might be suggestive....
I'm not sure how quickly octopi mature: at 18 months, I imagine Louis is a young octopus. I wonder: do adult octopi play in the wild? If Louis continues to play as an adult, does that mean the zoo has accidentally domesticated him?
I recall reading an argument at one point that humans are actually in a juvenile state. We stopped moving on to a mature state, which is why we never become completely rigid in our ways - and why we were able to become so successful evolutionarily. Also, physically, we look like Neanderthal children.
(Wish I had any clue when/where I read it; it was intriguing. But it was years ago.)
That's an interesting notion about humans remaining in a "juvenile" state. I know Stephen Jay Gould wrote quite a bit about neoteny (there's a famous essay where he uses Mickey Mouse as an illustration); if the piece you read was aimed at laymen, it may have been one of his. (If I get a chance and think of it, maybe I'll dig through and see if it's one I have on my shelf. (SJG's my favorite non-fiction writer. It's a damn loss he passed away.)
i recalled seeing this article about meerkats and play, and i thought i'd pass it along.
another thought tangent...i guess what interested me about animals dreaming is the idea of animals having an imagination. last night i had a dream that i entered a talent competition to do ballet to a police song that wasn't actually any real police song, just one that my imagination had made up. does oscar "imagine" that he is chasing balloons down a street that he has never actually been on and then suddenly the balloons pop and turn into gigantic cats in high heels who are then chasing him, this time in a big house, one that he has never actually been in?
interestingly, on a side note...i saw a national geographic show called "in the womb" recently that was fascinating because it showed how scientists learn a lot about evolution by looking at how dolphins and other animals develop in the womb. i remember learning that dolphins don't sleep because they would drown if they did...another tangent. sorry.
There may not be a way to know how much Oscar can imagine, but it's a great question because it tells us something about ourselves. Do we have imagination because it's a mammalian trait (shared to some degree by cats, dogs and mice), a primate trait (shared by chimps and monkeys) or a human trait? Or is it something that accidentally becomes possible in any brain of sufficient complexity? (I.e. perhaps only humans and cetaceans imagine; or perhaps only primates, cetaceans and elephants; or....)
I look forward to reading the Natural History article. Thanks for sending it. I opened it into a Firefox tab and will keep it open 'til I get a chance to really get into it. (It may be something I do instead of writing if I go to Smelly Cat tomorrow :-) )
P.S.
Oh--and I've also had dreams where I saw a movie that didn't exist or I'd never seen, or heard a nonexistent song. The brain's an interesting place....
Heh, the spandrels of St. Martin came to mind when you were talking about play as possibly a secondary characteristic.
It would be interesting if anyone ever invented a keyboard that had keys big enough for a dog or cat to use. I have a friend with a cat that can read (well... at least his own name). It'd be interesting what the cat would say if he could also write.
From the Natural History article, it appears (it's hard to tell) that adult meerkats don't play or play less than juvenile meerkats. I wish there'd been some clarification of that. In any case, the meerkat survey suggests that juvenile meerkats don't play for any of the adaptive purposes that are usually suggested (e.g. learning, socialization).
I'd forgotten about Gould's suggestion of "spandrels" to describe exaptive phenomena. ("The concept of biological spandrels... anchors the critique of overreliance upon adaptive scenarios in evolutionary explanation.") I guess that's a good way to frame it: is play adaptive or exaptive, and does the answer depend on the age and mental capacity of the organism?
I think that makes perfect sense. The ones that play more end up learning more skills, and can better make it out in the wilds of the "real world" when they're on their own. The ones that play less don't end up with those skills, so they stay in their parental basements and help raise the next set of kids.
Again, sometimes I think behavioral ecologists try to overthink it too much and try to reduce too much to numbers. That article would be an example.