Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Cuttlefish and other cephalopods are brimming with output. Publish or perish. To some extent, this output is designed by evolution to be seen; sometimes it is camouflage, but sometimes it is meant be noticed, by rivals and the opposite sex. The screen also seems to run through much chatter and murmuring, happenstance expression. And even if cephalopods have hidden powers of color perception, a lot of their wild chromatic output is surely lost on watchers. The baboons, on the other hand, can say hardly anything. Their channel of communication is very limited. But they hear much more. These are both partial cases, unfinished, in a sense, though one should not think of evolution as goal-directed. Evolution is not heading anywhere, not toward us or anyone else. But I can’t resist seeing, in both animals, an unfinished quality. They are both animals with a one-sidedness in their version of the fundamental signaling duality, the interlocking roles of sender and receiver, producer and interpreter. On the baboon side, there’s a soap opera life, frantic and stressful social complexity, and little means to express it. On the cephalopod side, there’s a simpler social life, hence less to say, but such extraordinary things expressed nonetheless.