Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 9

48. Other Minds in the UK

This post is a collection of pieces, a miscellany. First, the UK edition of Other Minds has been released by Harper-Collins. It is a superbly produced book, in a large format hardback with fine paper that brings out the black-and-white images mixed in with the text, as well as the color photos in the middle. The cover (a 115 year collaboration between Ernst Haeckel and Rodrigo Corral) is printed in a raised impression. You can feel each sucker on the octopus, and it seems to be reaching out...

48. OM in the UK

This post is a collection of pieces, a miscellany. First, the UK edition of Other Minds has been released by Harper-Collins. It is a superbly produced book, in a large format hardback with fine paper that brings out the black-and-white images mixed in with the text, as well as the color photos in the middle. The cover (a 115 year collaboration between Ernst Haeckel and Rodrigo Corral) is printed in a raised impression. You can feel each sucker on the octopus, and it seems to be reaching out...

47. Very Unusual Eyes

This photo is a repeat, and that is no accident; these are hard animals to photograph. It’s a serpulid worm, a marine cousin of earthworms. They are small (this one perhaps half an inch across), and when you get too close they disappear in an instant, snapping into a protective tube embedded in the jumbled overgrowth on their rock or reef.

I always thought they were sensing water currents when they triggered their sudden exits, as I said in the earlier post. But now I learn that some serpuli...

46. Reach

The photo is a video screenshot of an octopus reaching for another during a chase. This is a color version of the shot on page 68 of Other Minds, where it’s part of a discussion of the mixed and entangled way that octopuses seem to control their bodies.

An octopus has a large brain, but about two thirds of its neurons are spread through the body, especially in the arms. At talks and events I’ve done about Other Minds over the last month, this mix of centralized and decentralized control in o...

45. Other Minds Are Here

The book Other Minds was released today, after several years of thinking, diving, and writing, and then the best part of another year watching the book make its way through the press.The publisher is Farrar, Straus and Girouxin the US (Harper-Collins in the UK). The cover, designed by Rodrigo Corral, uses an octopus illustration by Ernst Haeckel.

This is the book that Metazoan.net was intended to incubate. Over the next few months I’ll use this site to post a number of photos that didn’t mak...

44. Mountains, Pyramid Postscripts

The photos are again from Wyoming and Montana. This is a last post (for now) about food and farming, following up this one and the one before. A few days after I wrote about the Montana conference, I read this passage in aninterview with Dale Jamieson in3 am magazine:

I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on. The idea that we would raise...

43. Raised by the Mountains

The picture above was taken in Wyoming, but the setting of the other photos and the text of this post is a little to the north, in Montana. I was there earlier this month for a conference. This was the first time I’d spent more than a few hours in the state, usually dipping in from below. On this trip I was able to look around, and did a long drive north to the area below Glacier National Park, including the evocative area round Augusta where the parts of the Polish brothers’ filmNorthforkwe...

42. Squashed by the Pyramid

An occasional theme of this website has been food – who eats what – and the relations between our diet and the treatment of animals. I’ve just finishing reading a book about food and the recent history of dietary science and advice, especially in relation to fat, Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise.

Early in the book I was reminded of a day, or more exactly, a moment, in 1998 or so. In the years leading up to that time I had tried hard to eat healthily according to the government-approved gu...

41. Night and Day

A few weeks ago I did a pair of dives, day and night, in the same spot in Sydney Harbour. Above is a scene from the day dive. I turned up and a pair of octopuses were sitting like this. I was pretty sure the one on the left (our left) is female, the one on the right male, from how they are positioned – the male further out and up, the female hunkered down with more coverage. (I’ve seen this combination a lot.) I admired the design sense of the octopus on the left, with her leaf and beer bott...

40. Orchids of the Sea

This post was put together for its title, a phrase that was the immediate reaction of Dave Pye, an orchid keeper, when I showed him some nudibranch photos a few weeks ago. The post features a couple of particularly orchidean nudis. The animal above is Flabellina rubrolineata, and the one below isFavorinus tsuruganus.*Both animals were just a centimeter or so long.

Orchids are plants related to asparagus, onions, and grasses. Nudibranchs are animals related to slugs and snails. Orchids have...