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Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

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with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

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You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Faunasphere / What About Blotchy?

What About Blotchy?

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By now you’ve probably heard of Inky, the New Zealand octopus who conducted a daring overnight jailbreak. He apparently:

  • "Hasta la vista chordates!"
    “Hasta la vista chordates!”

    slipped out of a small gap at the top of his tank

  • “scampered eight feet across the floor”
  • slid down a 164-foot-long drainpipe
  • swam to freedom

The Times, whose style book apparently favors “octopuses” over “octopi”, quotes aquarist Alix Harvey:

“Octopuses are fantastic escape artists…They are programmed to hunt prey at night and have a natural inclination to move around at night….They have a complex brain, have excellent eyesight, and research suggests they have an ability to learn and form mental maps.”

I wonder what resources of cognition, planning, perception, analysis, resourcefulness, and determination Inky used to effect his great escape. (And I wonder if we’ll ever be able to answer that question.)

In a Telegraph article, Inky’s keeper framed this as a case of curiosity gone awry:

“But Inky really tested the waters here. I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, as octopus are solitary creatures. But he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s just his personality.”

But I wonder. If octopuses are so intelligent—and Inky in particular—why assume they would be happy living out their lives in a tank being gawped at by humans? Isn’t the opposite assumption a lot more plausible?

As I noted earlier, it’s getting easier and easier to ask questions like these. In the past, anyone who felt even a shred of empathy for, or identification with, a nonhuman was accused of anthropomorphism—a career killer for scientists. Now, not anthropomorphism, but the lack of it, is becoming suspect. In a recent delightful New York Times oped What I Learned From Tickling Apes, noted animal behaviorist Frans de Waal calls the de facto ban on anthropomorphizing a “linguistic castration” and notes:

It is typically used to censure the attribution of humanlike traits and experiences to other species. Animals don’t have “sex,” but engage in breeding behavior. They don’t have “friends,” but favorite affiliation partners….

[Aristotle] put all living creatures on a vertical Scala Naturae, which runs from humans (closest to the gods) down toward other mammals, with birds, fish, insects and mollusks near the bottom. Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular scientific pastime, but all we have learned from them is how to measure other species by our standards. Keeping Aristotle’s scale intact, with humans on top, has been the unfailing goal.

Bolding mine.

Meanwhile the Times article notes that, “A less independence-minded octopus, Blotchy, remained behind.” Notice how anthropomorphism is okay if it serves the dominant paradigm—in this case, that an imprisoned animal loves his/her captivity. De Waal notes that it’s always been okay to anthropomorphize about, “tendencies that we consider animalistic (everyone is free to speak of aggression, violence and territoriality in animals).”

I wonder if Blotchy is really less independence-minded, or if he just lacks Inky’s skills or capacities.

I wonder if he, too, would escape if he had the chance.

EDIT:  Per erudite commenter lukeness: “Octopi is incorrect because the word octopus does not derive from Latin, but rather from Greek.”

 

Reader Interactions

115Comments

  2. 2.

    Gex

    The humans on top thing is problematic way to view things since that is not how evolution works. Every species that exists is at the top of its evolutionary line.

  3. 3.

    NCSteve

    Not only did he escape after carefully forming an elaborate plan involving travel down a drainpipe to freedom, on the way out, he mailed off a second set of books he’d kept detailing kickbacks his captors had been collecting to the local paper along with a letter detailing accusations about their consumption of seafood and then hit a dozen local banks and withdrew all the money before making his way to the Pacific.

  8. 8.

    Gin & Tonic

    @magurakurin: It’s even better — according to that link, the Pope is declining due to a scheduled visit to Lesbos. See, even Frankie likes himself some hot girl-on-girl action.

  10. 10.

    lukeness

    Octopi is incorrect because the word octopus does not derive from Latin, but rather from Greek.

  12. 12.

    dedc79

    Am I the only one suspicious that this is all the aquarium-public-relations version of parents telling their children that their favorite pet isn’t dead, but just went to live on a farm upstate?

  17. 17.

    Anoniminous

    The mass media’s grasp of Biology is even worse than their grasp of Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering. Don’t believe anything until you’ve checked the underlying paper.

    Just because I can, here is an actual paper about octopus as a contrast to the “Our Friend the Beaver” blather above.

  20. 20.

    slag

    I have no problem with not anthropomorphizing other species as long as we also stop anthropomorphizing humans.

  22. 22.

    Hillary Rettig

    @dedc79: actually I was wondering that, too. not specifically that he died in the tank b/c captive animals are always doing that, but that he is probably dead in the escape and they are manufacturing a happy ending.

    I hope not

  23. 23.

    Capri

    To anthropomorphize breeding behavior is not to say that animals have sex, it’s to say that they “make love” – which would still get one laughed out of a scientific discussion.
    The idea that non-human animals are stimuli/response boxes has been debunked for over half a century. Animals have cognitive abilities and possess many of the social traits that people in the past believed only humans possessed. To discover that animals have these abilities is not anthropomorphizing, it’s just recognizing that other animals and humans share things in common. Elephants have empathy and form social bonds in the manner of elephants, which is not necessarily like that of humans.

    I’ve heard Frans de Waal talk on this subject and he is extremely thought provoking. His book The Bonobo and the Athiest is wonderful.

  25. 25.

    NCSteve

    @Hillary Rettig: Although, to be fair, this was really more like someone checking themselves out of the hospital AMA. He’d been brought in injured and they were rehabbing him for release back into the wild.

    He obviously decided he’d had all the help he needed

  27. 27.

    sunny raines

    They have a complex brain, have excellent eyesight, and research suggests they have an ability to learn and form mental maps.

    Sounds like the answer the republicans have been looking for – what and upgrade!!!!

  28. 28.

    NCSteve

    @Capri: I am no fan of B.F. Skinner, but the real problem was caused by generations of social scientists and animal behaviorists who elevated a methodology for differentiating science from intuition into a dogma that supplied its own truths.

    Not that Skinner didn’t cause that by doing that very thing himself, of course.

  29. 29.

    Mike Toreno

    It was clear that he wasn’t happy there. The aquarium is focusing on the escape itself as if it was a spur of the moment thing and ignoring the 20 years he spent chiseling through the wall with a rock hammer, concealing the hole behind a Raquel Welch poster

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    De Waal notes that it’s always been okay to anthropomorphize about, “tendencies that we consider animalistic (everyone is free to speak of aggression, violence and territoriality in animals).”

    This is just part of it. Some of the worst, most pointless, and most damaging science related to studying animals has been the imposition of ANY kind of anthropomorphism, positive or negative. This also pertains to the study of human evolution and our early ancestors.

    Some researchers cannot just observe and record animal behavior. They insist on overtly or subconsciously praising behavior they like or condemning behavior they don’t like, or insisting a priori that animals must be exactly like us. There may be some continuities and similarities in behaviors, but this is something different.

    Keeping Aristotle’s scale intact, with humans on top, has been the unfailing goal.

    I don’t ever recall seeing Aristotle’s scale mentioned in any standard biology text or work related to evolution. The classification system of species does not, in itself, imply any hierarchy of greater or lesser animals.

  33. 33.

    Davis X. Machina

    @lukeness: The –us ending is what’s doing the confusing. It can arise on the end of a (nominative singular) noun in several different ways, in Latin, Greek, and English.

    A Greek second declension noun routinely passes into the Latin second declension, and the Greek nominative forms (-ος, -os singular and -οι , -os, plural) naturally get interpreted as Latin -us, plural, -ī)

    The Greek word for ‘octopus’ is actually πολυπους (polypous, ‘many-footed’, cf. Spanish pulpo, Italian polpo. Its stem is πολυποδ- (polpyod-), and its nominative plural πολυποδες, polypodes. Even so, in poetry, a plural πολυποι, polypoi, is common, and that would have been Latinized as polypi.

    Our noun “octopus” was actually coined only in the 18th c. by Carolus Linnaeus, by analogy with πολυπους, Latin polypus. He’d have had the Latin plural polypī in mind.

    So octopi is perfectly defensible after all, as is octipodes, and for that matter octopusses.

  34. 34.

    CaseyL

    I was a volunteer at Seattle’s Aquarium for 5 years, and one of the high points was being able to play with the octopuses. (In the holding area, I should add; not in the public exhibit area. We’d have two “octos” in the display tank, and at least two more in the Life Sciences holding area.)

    They are not only highly intelligent, but have distinct personalities: some were surprisingly gregarious (surprising in that they are essentially solitary critters) and would swarm up to the surface of their tank when I opened it to feed/play with them. There were a couple times they’d get so wrapped up in playing – more correctly, had gotten me so wrapped up – that I needed help from the nearby diver volunteers to get unwrapped.

    (We called the round red marks their suckers leave on our skin “octopus kisses.” Best thing ever.)

    The reason octopuses don’t dominate the world is because Mother Nature played a lousy joke on them: they’re terminal breeders, meaning they die after they reproduce. They stop eating, go senescent, and slowly die. Mom lives a little longer than Dad – enough to see her eggs hatch, and that’s it.

    I’m waiting and hoping for a random mutation to change that, and allow one generation to pass on its knowledge to the next. Then we’ll see some proper Kraken/Cthulhu action!

  35. 35.

    kbuttle

    Following in Amir, it’s not the Style Book. It’s just not a Latin word. It’s from Greek, so yeah, technical term would be octopodes. But scientists know what fking pedants they’d be seen as lobbying for that use, and just avoided the battle. So octopuses.

  36. 36.

    kbuttle

    Following on Amir, it’s not the Style Book. It’s just not a Latin word. It’s from Greek, so yeah, technical term would be octopodes. But scientists know what fking pedants they’d be seen as lobbying for that use, and just avoided the battle. So octopuses.

  37. 37.

    Hillary Rettig

    @CaseyL: thanks for the personal perspective – and love your musings about that random mutation

    don’t know if you’re into sf, but just in case have you read Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean? Fantastic book – won the Campbell award. Terrific worldbuilding by a real biologist, and lots of ceph action.

  38. 38.

    kbuttle

    Sorry for missing lukeness earlier, and Davis’s response as I typed.

    Also of interest to Hillary’s post is the research late last year in Science that showed empathy in rats. Concrete empathy for others of their species. That’s really far away from us phylogenetically, and suggests that it is scattered all over the place in modern mammals.

  40. 40.

    Mnemosyne

    @dedc79:

    Octopuses really are damned smart, though, and are well-known escape artists. So it’s perfectly plausible that a determined octopus could escape that way.

    @NCSteve:

    Also, this. He had been brought in missing a couple of tentacles after being attacked by a predatory fish (they said what they thought it was, but now I can’t remember). So is animal rehabilitation now considered inhumane, and we should just euthanize sick and injured animals rather than nursing them back to health and returning them to the wild?

  42. 42.

    Hillary Rettig

    @Mike Toreno: almost named the post The Inky Redemption. It wouldn’t have worked tho because it more correctly would have been the New Zealand Aquarium Redemption. Not the same ring.

  44. 44.

    ? Martin

    @lukeness:

    Octopi is incorrect because the word octopus does not derive from Latin, but rather from Greek.

    Actually, octopi should be incorrect because you decline/conjugate according to the rules of the language you are speaking, not the language you borrowed the word from. It’s not a latin or greek word, it’s an english word that just so happens to be similar to the foreign word. We don’t decline french/spanish borrowed words for gender, for example – we treat them as english words.

    So you pluralize octopus according to english conventions, one of which is to not follow convention and just make shit up, which is why nobody really knows how to pluralize octopus.

  45. 45.

    gvg

    I rather doubt this story. Octopuses are excellent smart escape artists. It’s the part about the pipe to the ocean that strikes me as wishful thinking. I have sad reason to know fishy types that jump out and don’t get back to water, dry up into little crisps pretty fast. Moray eels also escape through gaps you would think are too small and I lost a snowflake that way and no longer keep fish. Unless the pipe was really close to the ocean and they had some trail evidence that the octopus got there, he is more likely to have died.
    Oh well

  47. 47.

    elmo

    @gvg: Yeah, I was wondering about that myself. The missus keeps all kinds of aquatic critters, including axolotls, and none of them do very well on dry land.

  48. 48.

    Randy P

    Re anthropomorphizing animals. I remember reading a kids book about cats to my kids once. (We always had a couple of cats around throughout most of their childhoods, so it was always a subject of interest). Suddenly I run into a page describing the thing where the cat rubs affectionately against you and the book says something like: “this may look like affection but really the cat just wants to get his scent on you”.

    I went whaaaa? We’re not supposed to believe our pets are capable of loving us? We’re not supposed to think cats and dogs have emotions? How about fear, are they allowed that one?

    That was the first time I ran into this mode of thought, but I’ve seen it other places since. And I always find it bizarre. Especially given that we talk about emotions as arising from the most primitive parts of our brain, the “reptile brain” that is shared with the brains of the entire mammal family. But apparently somebody somewhere decreed that “emotions” are reserved to humans.

  50. 50.

    Mike in DC

    Inky left a cryptic note:
    The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne

    @? Martin:

    So you pluralize octopus according to english conventions, one of which is to not follow convention and just make shit up, which is why nobody really knows how to pluralize octopus.

    G is currently doing reading tutoring for someone whose second language is English, and there are times when he tells her a grammar rule and she gives him some side-eye, like, Wait, are you kidding me?

    And all he can do is shrug and say, “It’s English. There’s nothing I can do.”

  53. 53.

    Feathers

    Here is an article about octopus intelligence and how the octopus has half of its neurons distributed among its arms. The scientist talks about how studying this would be one of the best ways to prepare for the study of alien intelligence, as it is so unlike the one-brain intelligence we find almost everywhere else on earth. Thinking Like an Octopus

    This wasn’t the article I was looking for, which is about the theory that the capacity for intelligence is began as excess capacity which was available after a brain grew in order to control limbs. The more limbs, the higher the intelligence. So human are so smart, or can be smart, because of our two arms, two legs, and ten fingers. Octopuses are intelligent because of the brainpower needed to control their eight legs. Googling octopus, intelligence, arms is a good mind hole to fall down.

  56. 56.

    Peter

    Scientists like to avoid anthropormorphizing animals not out of some need to protect a chart Aristotle made a thousand years ago but because there’s a long history of anthropormorphism leading biologists to hilariously incorrect conclusions. Animals have emotions; that doesn’t make them tiny people.

    I could really do without this Greenpeace-level nature hugging garbage on the front page.

  57. 57.

    Linnaeus

    @Mnemosyne:

    And all he can do is shrug and say, “It’s English. There’s nothing I can do.”

    The way I look at it, the often seemingly nonsensical aspects of English are what comes with the richness of the language.

  59. 59.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Anoniminous: yeah, if I had a $100 bucks for every liberal arts major I met who whined “I’m an English/journalism/history major, why should I have to take three semesters of math and science? I’ll never need them!”…

  60. 60.

    Benw

    “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn is an interesting read about the myths that humans tell ourselves to preserve the idea that humans are a specially important species that own the Earth, rather than one of many species living together.

  62. 62.

    Frankensteinbeck

    You continue to not understand anthropomorphism in a scientific context. Nobody thinks animals don’t have feelings. It is blatantly obvious and well demonstrated that the more intelligent animals, pretty much all birds and mammals have emotions, and lower than that the debate is too complex to cover here. The problem is assuming those emotions work like ours do, which historically has led to all kinds of scientific mistakes. We only recently found out how ridiculously common non-binary sexuality is in nature because of assumptions that animals should basically work like people (think they work). The keeper is being inappropriately anthropomorphic in assuming he knows Inky was ‘curious’ and not ‘unhappy’, but nobody cares because he’s speaking as an animal handler and not making scientific discoveries. He might be right. Nobody expects a newspaper journalist to be right about anything, more’s the pity. And de Waal is being a bit contrarian and strawmanny, but his basic point is interesting in a context that you have shown you do not have.

  63. 63.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @gvg: Octopuses are excellent smart escape artists

    So are snakes, but I doubt they’ll get the cushy anthropomorphic coverage in the Times an octopus does. I can’t tell you how many we had to pull out of a hole in the wall or from my cupboards or halfway down my Goddamned dishwasher drain once. We had a budding herpetoligist grow up in our house, and those snakes simply could not be contained in his room!! Tell you what, not only are Boas smart they’re strong!!!

  64. 64.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @catclub:
    Comparing different intelligences is hard, because we’re finding it’s not one scale, but a collection of separate, semi-independent skills. Still, when you want to describe how smart some unusual animal is to a layman, ‘like a cat’ is great shorthand.

  65. 65.

    Barbara

    @Brachiator: I would simply say that humans both prove their “animalness” and their “exceptional status” by wondering whether they really fit at the top of any chain of existence. Whatever we do and don’t deserve, it’s hard for me to imagine other animals trying to figure where they fit in the order of things. I think most living things aim above all to survive, and in part, the human approach to the hierarchy that never fails to place humans at the top is one way of expressing an instinct for survival. If I place myself somewhere other than at the top I am exceptional in the animal kingdom, and if I don’t, I am just like any other animal. Weird, huh?

  66. 66.

    Major Major Major Major

    Why is everybody being mean on a cute little post about animals? I could understand a “my science-fu is stronger than yours” debate if it was a post by Tom or something.

    In simpler times, we would call this a “blog post”.

  68. 68.

    Barbara

    About Blotchy versus Inky, I thought about a poem by Theodore Roethke called “The Meadow Mouse,” and it ends as follows:

    But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
    Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
    My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? —
    To run under the hawk’s wing,
    Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
    To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

    On the other hand, if the mouse had not escaped soon enough, most likely it would have gotten used to being fed out of the hand of its little boy owner, who caught it, and maybe would not have been so eager to escape to the natural world into which it was born. It doesn’t have to be all one way or the other.

  70. 70.

    D58826

    I wonder if Blotchy is really less independence-minded, or if he just lacks Inky’s skills or capacities.

    Maybe he just figured he had it made and why change.

  71. 71.

    Hungry Joe

    Alternate escape scenario: After many years of placidly accepting incarceration, Inky had an epiphany and broke free, returning to the land — or in the case, the ocean — of his ancestors to live out his days gorging on fish. His only lapse was neglecting to smother Jack Nicholson on his way out.

  73. 73.

    Germy

    @D58826: Inky left to register to vote. Blotchy said “why bother, not a dime’s difference between the parties.”

  75. 75.

    slag

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Nobody thinks animals don’t have feelings.

    I’ve seen many a camera-ready scientist say things on the tv to call bullshit on this one. Historically speaking, that is. It seems our understanding of other members of the animal kingdom has evolved quite a bit over time. However, our understanding of ourselves seems still stuck in the dark ages.

  76. 76.

    Chris

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    yeah, if I had a $100 bucks for every liberal arts major I met who whined “I’m an English/journalism/history major, why should I have to take three semesters of math and science? I’ll never need them!”…

    I’m very sympathetic to this point of view, sorry. Most gen-ed requirements are things that should be left to high schools. It’s not as though my one math class, my two science classes and my two literature classes in college were so far above that level that I suddenly developed a new understanding for the subject matter – for the most part, it was just rehashing the same exact things we’d done in high school. And it isn’t as though American colleges are so cheap that most people can afford to piss away a semester or two on “High School, 2.0.”

  78. 78.

    Trollhattan

    @Chris:
    Agree, presuming they can show AP-level science and math in HS. Those who skated past the topics, and there are plenty, “need” at least some comprehension of both, lest they become Republicans. And the vice to the versa, science majors and especially engineering majors need some goddamn college-level wiring and communication, and I don’t care how loaded their schedules are. The real world requires it.

  79. 79.

    Brachiator

    @Barbara:

    I would simply say that humans both prove their “animalness” and their “exceptional status” by wondering whether they really fit at the top of any chain of existence.

    I don’t think that this has anything to do with good science, which may be separate from the pop psychology of how people think about themselves and other animals.

    Whatever we do and don’t deserve, it’s hard for me to imagine other animals trying to figure where they fit in the order of things.

    You ever see the Planet of the Apes movies? I think that at a certain level of intelligence and self-awareness, other animals and perhaps also extra-terrestrial beings, if any exist, would ponder the universe and their place in it.

    I think most living things aim above all to survive, and in part, the human approach to the hierarchy that never fails to place humans at the top is one way of expressing an instinct for survival. If I place myself somewhere other than at the top I am exceptional in the animal kingdom, and if I don’t, I am just like any other animal. Weird, huh?

    No matter where we place ourselves, we for the most part see some distinction between ourselves and other animals.

  80. 80.

    Unknown known (tablet edition)

    @Brachiator:

    Some researchers cannot just observe and record animal behavior. They insist on overtly or subconsciously praising behavior they like or condemning behavior they don’t like…

    That’s as may be, but I’m still creeped out by wasps that lay an egg in the brain of a live other insect, so that their lava can have a nice warm chewy pulsating breakfast when it hatches…. And slowly kill the host in the process as they get bigger. Ew ew ew.

  81. 81.

    Mnemosyne

    @Trollhattan:

    I’m all for making engineers take more liberal arts, but forcing English majors into calculus classes? Um, no. I couldn’t even get through Math For Dummies in college and had to drop out of trig in high school.

    I was fine with science as long as it didn’t require me to solve equations on the tests, so I took astronomy, chemistry for non-science majors, and gerentology.

  82. 82.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Linnaeus: @Chris: Sorry, but just because it’s hard and doesn’t come easy to you does not mean it’s worthless. And given what the content of the average watered down, highly-politicized high school course in a variety of topics is today, taking one at a college level DOES matter.

    A well-educated person MUST understand science, it’s rationales and methods, and it’s basic math. And I totally agree, science and engineering majors need to understand the humanities, history and literature, and other social sciences. And how to write–some of the worst writers are hard science and engineering majors.

  83. 83.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Mnemosyne: all math is not calculus, and I will say that it’s pretty hard to understand biological and physical concepts with only “Math Appreciation” classes that teach you how to add, subtract and calculate simple interest.

    And I say this as a person who actually has degrees in the social and natural sciences.

  84. 84.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    Then I will have to content myself with only a shallow understanding of science. I’m actually okay with that, because not everyone has the same skills. I wouldn’t expect you to be able to write a screenplay after taking Film Appreciation 101, either.

    ETA: Both of my degrees are in film — criticism and screenwriting — so while I’m interested in reading about science, I have no desire to try and do science.

  85. 85.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Mnemosyne:

    I was fine with science as long as it didn’t require me to solve equations on the tests, so I took astronomy, chemistry for non-science majors, and gerentology.

    Those are GREAT classes! See, you learned a lot and it didn’t hurt at all. lolol

  86. 86.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    Like I said, I actually like learning about science, but I can’t do calculations and equations. The only math that ever made sense to me was geometry, and that was probably because they let us keep 3×5 cards with the proofs on them to use for tests.

  87. 87.

    Chris

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    Yes, but again, my point isn’t “it’s hard and doesn’t come easy to me.” My point is “what the hell did I learn from those few meager required college courses that I didn’t already know from high school?” And the answer, at least as far as my own undergraduate education goes, is “absolutely nothing!”

    I agree that every adult needs a basic understanding of science and math, and a number of other topics as well. But that’s what school is supposed to be for. Higher education, as the name implies, is supposed to be where you go beyond those things and into more advanced and specialized studies. I’ll totally agree, as well, that you shouldn’t be able to go into higher education without having shown a satisfactory understanding of the “basics” by the end of twelfth grade… but that would still be leaving the high school requirements in high school, where they belong.

  89. 89.

    Bill Hicks

    I like when people point out that “simple”/invertebrate animals “think” too, but rarely do I see anyone point out the same thing about even “simpler” organisms like plants and bacteria. Sounds shocking, but look up the research on sensitive plants and nervous systems, and bacterial biofilms. Michael Pollan does a great job of expressing this for plants in his works. Basically almost all living things are capable of “thought” and “communication” and are just as “good” as any other species, they just might “think” a lot slower than you or in different ways. A good way to start learning about how almost all organisms “think” is to learn about ant colonies and how they work and that helps in the transition to understanding how bacteria and plants “think” as well. My thoughts may seem pedantic, but they have important philosophical consequences especially in terms of research ethics and diet.

  90. 90.

    catclub

    @NCSteve: They SAY that he made it through the drain pipe to the ocean. Has he been spotted in the wild?
    I fear he is dead in the pipe.

  91. 91.

    cbear

    @Peter:

    Animals have emotions; that doesn’t make them tiny people.

    No, but it does disrupt the long-held scientific concept of animals as less than sentient beings, and certainly furthers our understanding of the natural world and ourselves.

    I could really do without this Greenpeace-level nature hugging garbage on the front page.

    Then scroll on by, asshole.

    While Hillary’s post and the article cited may indeed ascribe thoughts, motivations, and behaviors to the octopus that are neither accurate nor provable—so what? The fact is that we are just now beginning to study (and possibly understand) other species through a whole new paradigm.

    Someone above mentioned elephants displaying empathy–I find it far more interesting that there are new studies that show Rats displaying empathy and dogs seeming to grasp the concept of fairness. Or, at least our understanding of those concepts.

    Hell, one day we may even be able to train the rats and the dogs to pass along their knowledge to Republicans.

  92. 92.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    I kind of disagree with you — I think college presents an opportunity to get the basics about sciences that 90 percent of high schools don’t offer. Astronomy was my “earth sciences” requirement and Gerentology was my “biology” requirement, but neither of those were offered in high school. There are whole fields of science that are available at the college level and not at the high school level, and I think it’s good to encourage/force people to explore the basics of them.

    But math sucks. Math requirements for people in the arts are stupid.

  95. 95.

    Mnemosyne

    @Trollhattan:

    I flunked trig. Twice. Whatever you need to have in your brain to comprehend higher-level math, I don’t have it.

    With the help of Excel to do the actual calculating, I can actually do fairly sophisticated percentages and stuff, but I’m sure my trial-and-error method is not the “right” way to do it.

  96. 96.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Ella in New Mexico: Plate tectonics and paleontology were both pretty cool for this English major. Obviously part of 2 different courses, but those courses were excellent selections for fascinating content, if I may say so without boasting.

  97. 97.

    Trollhattan

    @Mnemosyne:
    When I took trig we had to look up the values in that goddam seven-pound book of trig tables–hopefully now that the cool kids get to use calculators they can spend more time on theory and less, on process-by-rote. I just don’t know.

    I suspect in lieu of the hard-science path there are other math options like stat, econ and such. I’m about to find out, as the kid starts HS in fall.

  99. 99.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Chris: all I can say is you must have gone to one hell of a good high school. My kids didn’t get any in depth discussion about a lot of important stuff in American History, for example the Revolutionary or Civil Wars and their complex roots. They DID learn a lot in college in the two semesters of required history they took.

  100. 100.

    evodevo

    @Unknown known (tablet edition): They leave the brain for last BWWAHAHAHAHAHA – actually, there is a parasitic worm that infects crickets and grasshoppers (so-called “horsehair worm”) that develops inside the host and, in the last stages, cause the host to seek water. The worm then bores out through the exoskeleton and escapes. Hey! I’m a biologist … I got a million of ’em!

  101. 101.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Trollhattan:

    When I took trig we had to look up the values in that goddam seven-pound book of trig tables

    And don’t forget: Slide rules.

    What was hilarious by today’s standards was the “new” Texas Instruments classroom calculators that we got to use in class. I’ll never forget how we learned how to spell “hello” if you typed in 01134 and turned the thing upside down. Ahh, the 70’s!!!!

    @Mnemosyne:

    But math sucks. Math requirements for people in the arts are stupid.

    But how will you ever know if your unemployment checks are correct? (lolol just kidding love me some art majors)

  103. 103.

    Brachiator

    @Chris:

    I agree that every adult needs a basic understanding of science and math, and a number of other topics as well. But that’s what school is supposed to be for. Higher education, as the name implies, is supposed to be where you go beyond those things and into more advanced and specialized studies.

    Too rigid to be true. One of the best, most rigorous and enjoyable courses when I was in college was Literature X, that dealt with literary genres and dealt with comic books and pop literature. It was an introductory course in the Comparative Literature Department, and one section was taught by one of the most eminent literary scholars in the country and his best grad students. It wasn’t just the course material, but the professors easy mastery of the topic, something not available in the average high school, that made the course illuminating.

    My intro anthropology course, taught by an instructor doing active, vital field research, was a science course not available to the average high school.

    There should be low level statistics courses, that deal with evaluation of news stories, political polls, etc, for college students.

  104. 104.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    But math sucks. Math requirements for people in the arts are stupid.

    But there is practical math, including some sophisticated math, involved in aspects of film production. People use math all the time and don’t realize it.

  105. 105.

    Trollhattan

    @Ella in New Mexico:
    My kid has been accepted into the local HS’s history and international studies program, so hopefully she’ll be lecturing my butt by the time she’s a junior–being sciency I had the minimum possible history in high school. I kid, she’ll start lecturing me this fall.

    As a brag for the program, they’re sending two two-person debate teams to the national Tournament of Champions (improbably in Kentucky). Two teams of 72 total ain’t half bad.

  106. 106.

    PurpleGirl

    I started college as a chemistry majors. I dropped out from chemistry (due to problems handling mathematics) and became a Political Science (American Government) major. But I still had the various Area Distribution Requirements (ADRs) to meets, so I was going to need varoius science and other social science courses. I ended up getting a minor in Physics/Astronomy because I took so many courses with one professor. At one point the Political Science department protested that they only had X number of tenured professor and several thousands majors AND the Physics department had Y number of tenured professor and ONLY 6 majors. The Physics professors were told to develop courses that non-science majors would take. Professor Englebert Shucking was an expert in Non-Einsteinian Relativities. He liked astronomy so he developed a couple of courses. I took them all. Professor Shucking was a neat older man who wore denim and liked to talk to students no mater their major. Voila, the department then filled out the course menu with labs and they had the requirements for minor. Which I met — I had a minor is Physics/Astronomy.

  107. 107.

    PurpleGirl

    @Brachiator: I took a class in historial mathematics. I learned to count as Egyptians did, also Babylonian mathematics and a bunch of other stuff. I’ve forgotten a lot of it but it was interesting and managed to get a B+ for the course.

  110. 110.

    Brachiator

    @PurpleGirl:

    I took a class in historial mathematics. I learned to count as Egyptians did, also Babylonian mathematics and a bunch of other stuff. I’ve forgotten a lot of it but it was interesting and managed to get a B+ for the course.

    This sounds like a fun course.

  113. 113.

    Dmbeaster

    Time to realize that our precious and allegedly so unique human feelings are just another animal trait, and there is no logic to supposing that evolution has not equipped other creatures with similar emotions for similar survival benefits.

    Feelings should be viewed as the half-brother of instinct. Rather than specific behavior being programmed by instinct to be the response to outside stimuli, feelings program a disposition to react to stimuli but do not program the exact behavioral response. No reason to think that other higher animals do not have similar wiring.

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