Sooo... can we breed octopi for intelligence? How far could that rise in say a hundred years?
and I just found this...: http://danielkeating.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/could-we-breed-...
and I just found this...: http://danielkeating.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/could-we-breed-...
Not cephalopods specifically, but the idea of breeding smarter animals is touched on by David Brin in his "Uplift" novels.
I've often thought about how fascinating it would be if some organization took on the long-term task of breeding for intelligence. Perhaps it would require a well-funded non-profit to provide the resources. Could it be done more open-source styled, with standardized tests, individuals breeding animals and submitting gene sequences for analysis (is there a 23andme for animals)?
How interesting would it be to (ultimately) talk to a gorilla or octopus philosopher?
Being bred for human style intelligence, it would have similar capabilities to our own in terms of cognitive capacities. Yet its metaphors for interacting with the world would all be based on the body of an octopus. It would have a tenticle in both worlds.
Some things would overlap, like big meaning important, sharp meaning dangerous or cutting. Others might not, for instance any metaphor having to do with wetness would probably have a different meaning for the octopus whose home is the water than it does for those of us on land.
It's hard to measure IQ without a social context.
Humans are unique in that most of our collective learning is shareable and externalised. If you took a human child and kept it completely isolated from all external teaching and human contact until after puberty, it's not obvious that it would appear that much more intelligent than an octopus.
Conversely, if you could give an octopus the genes for a much longer lifespan and less need to be solitary, I don't know what you'd get - but it might be scary smart.
Obviously we cannot deliberately test this hypothesis, but there have been a few cases of children raised in isolation who failed to ever attain an adult level of language [0]. In fact, if you measure by number of acquired words alone (a dubious metric), their capacity for learning language was at the same order of magnitude as gorillas [1] (the validity of gorilla language studies remains controversial).
To be taken with a rock of salt, of course, but it shows that development is far from guaranteed. This makes determining the intelligence potential of a species very difficult: what is the optimal environment for baby octopi to learn to communicate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation#Cases_of_...
Who has time to wait 100 years? Intelligence is not really correlated with brain size, but I'd start by breeding octopodes and then selecting the octopus eggs that seem to be inhabited by octopus with larger-than-average brains. Their eggs are transparent and you can just look, while tossing the ones that you don't want to hatch. Next I would iterate on this for a few generations, meanwhile selecting for octopus problem solving and communication.
I wouldn't worry about that; their limbs are welcome along for the ride.
Oh certainly, agreed. But larger brains can be easier to work with, such as for slicing studies where you examine the different areas of the brain to look for evidence of changes that you might want to keep for the next generation. Smaller brains have less matter to work with, and therefore have less of a chance of developing novel features that strike your fancy while you attempt to select the ones that might have a higher probability of developing impressive cognitive ability. Having said this, I am very interested in trying to take something already rather clever (like a dog) and seeing how small we can get the brain before it loses all of its interesting behavior. For whatever reason society has already developed a fascination with really small dogs with small heads anyway.....