25. The Octopus Genome and Neural Evolution

Last week an important octopus paper came out, reporting the firstsequencing of an octopus genome.It’s full of interesting findings. In this post I’ll pick up something that goes by quickly in the new paper, and has not been commented on much so far.

Large nervous systems evolved independently in animals like us and in octopuses. This raises questions about whether our brains do things the same way as their brains, or differently. One of the results in the new paper concerns how nervous syst...