The Octopus: Stable Genius | Hacker News Reader

The Octopus: Stable Genius

nytimes.com

83 pointsmontrose16 comments

For a much more in-depth article, I'd recommend Amia Srinivasan's review of two recent books about octopuses at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the.... Of course, the books that Srinivasan reviews go into far more depth than any article summarizing them could, but if you're not going to read the entire books, I think you'll still find this article very interesting.

Thanks. If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy David Foster Wallace's famous essay Consider the Lobster, which also examines the issues inherent in comprehending the inner experience of animals, and the ethics involved in our eating of them.

I can only find this genius link, unfortunately: https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-consider-the-lobster...

That was a thoughtful, interesting article. From the link: "Like most arthropods, they date from the Jurassic period, biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as well be from another planet." (then later...) “The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.”

Which makes it all the more remarkable that we share some basic elements. As Jordan Peterson recently explained in his book (12 rules) and the now-famous BBC Channel 4 interview, lobsters have been around for an exceedingly long time -- before there were trees! And we share a number of hormonal pathways with this lowly, delicious creature.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lobster+dopamine

The same hormonal triggers that lead an Alpha-lobster to walk with pride and swagger and respect among his carapace-suited peers are involved in our own human sense of accomplishment leading to machismo. How incredible that durable, robust mechanisms replicate in nature and result in enormously complex systems (such as social networks),built on this foundation!

Your selective quotation misses the main point of Wallace's piece. He is wrestling with the ethics of causing gratuitous suffering.

The 'grasshopper' quote is Wallace actually quoting the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, possibly not an unbiased source for science. Wallace goes on to say:

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim [grasshopper quotation] is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.

Wallace goes on to write:

The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.

This expanded quote got me to go look up videos of live lobsters being boiled. None of them showed the lobster reacting to being immersed in the water the way Wallace describes

https://www.amazon.com/Consider-Lobster-Essays-Foster-Wallac...

That's an amazing article. Thanks for sharing. They truly are such cool creatures.

http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/Xenopsychology.htm

This is an interesting essay on the minds of our ocean-dwelling aliens.

My daughter and I have been learning about octopui and squids and I never cease to be amazed by these creatures so far removed from us on the evolutionary tree. Recently I learned how scientists studied the squids giant axons to understand our own brains.

I recently took a class which extensively covered the early squid giant axon research. While they are very far away from us in the evolutionary tree, the overall mechanisms are very similar. You might also want to check out Otto Loewi's famous frog heart experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Loewi

I believe you mean octopodes my good sir. https://youtu.be/wFyY2mK8pxk

Pip pip, cup of tea, cheerio.

i thought the same immediately: octopus is a screwy latiny-misspelled greeky word, with octopodes the plural. happy to see another knew that.

This view is "contentious" :-)

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/270/what-is-the-...

That it might be but it's pretty clear the Latin associated plural is misapplied.

So English has octopuses.

Greek has octopodes.

Some English speakers prefer to use the Greek word rather then the loan derived plural which uses English construction.

I was trying to explain how CitusDB works the other day to another developer and tried using an octopus as an analogy. Turns out I needed an analogy to explain my analogy.

They must have been thinking about Trump's comment when they made the headline, right?

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