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The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

nytimes.com

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Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#111

Post by goldenkey »

mathieuh wrote: post #110
jaggednad wrote: post #37

One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for…

Evolution is not a directed process. It is essentially a load of small random mutations, and the random evolutions that improve the organism's fitness get passed on. So, yeah octopodes are really cool, but it's not correct to say that octopodes evolves intelligence and chromo-camouflage in some sort of direct way because they needed to become intelligent: what would have happened was over a very long time, certain fa…

OP isn't claiming that evolution is directed. He's simply illustrating the magnification effect of existing bodily structure on intelligence mutations.

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#112

Post by goldenkey »

diminoten wrote: post #85
jaggednad wrote: post #37

One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for…

I sometimes feel like we talk about evolution wrong. Here, for example; it's not like gazelles couldn't take advantage of being smarter, there are plenty of advantages to be had if you can outsmart your predator, it's just that the smarter gazelles weren't ever smart enough for that to matter. It's more about if it's possible for minute intelligence improvements to produce higher survival chances. For a gazelle, the…

You could formulate this argument simply as a differential equation.

d(SurvivalGazel) = 0.001 dIntelligence

d(SurvivalOctopus) = dIntelligence^2

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#113

Post by mathieuh »

goldenkey wrote: post #111
mathieuh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is not a directed process. It is essentially a load of small random mutations, and the random evolutions that improve the organism's fitness get passed on. So, yeah octopodes are really cool, but it's not correct to say that octopodes evolves intelligence and chromo-camouflage in some sort of direct way because they needed to become intelligent: what would have happened was over a very long time, certain fa…

OP isn't claiming that evolution is directed. He's simply illustrating the magnification effect of existing bodily structure on intelligence mutations.

OK I think I've just ended up reading OP in a such a way that it appeared OP was saying that primates evolved opposable thumbs because they needed opposable thumbs, as if evolving opposable thumbs suddenly resulted in primates thinking "you know what would be awesome? If we could touch the pads on our hands together."

There isn't a "because".

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#114

Post by rwmj »

rland wrote: post #22

Octopuses are really incredible creatures. They diverged from humans in the evolutionary tree hundreds of millions of years ago. Our common ancestor would have been a very dumb animal. Their brain structure is so different: 8 semi-autonomous tentacles, with one sort of central coordinating body. What could it possibly be like to experience the world that way? They're probably the "peak" of intelligence with the most…

Also their esophagus/gut passes through their brain, which is hoop shaped. They have this weird characteristic in common with other molluscs, and it's a good example of how evolution can't "fix" obvious problems (see also: Laryngeal nerve).

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#115

Post by pbhjpbhj »

goldenkey wrote: post #112
diminoten wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes feel like we talk about evolution wrong. Here, for example; it's not like gazelles couldn't take advantage of being smarter, there are plenty of advantages to be had if you can outsmart your predator, it's just that the smarter gazelles weren't ever smart enough for that to matter. It's more about if it's possible for minute intelligence improvements to produce higher survival chances. For a gazelle, the…

You could formulate this argument simply as a differential equation. d(SurvivalGazel) = 0.001 dIntelligence d(SurvivalOctopus) = dIntelligence^2

Surely survivability has to decrease with intelligence otherwise all intelligence would rise over time.

We have an expression (aphorism), something like "clever enough to be dangerous".

Intelligent enough to experiment, but not too realise the dangers involved is relatively common in humans; the societal system in the past mitigated the dangers by pairing younglings with adults who can tell them when they're being dumb.

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#116

Post by imaginenore »

caf wrote: post #103
Yetanfou wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? For us, certainly, but put all land-life on a scales and all sea-life on the other side and it'd most certainly tip to the sea-side.

This paper has some information: http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 (see " The Distribution of Biomass Across Environments and Trophic Modes "). They divide biomass up into three environments, with 6 Gt C in "marine", 70 Gt C in "deep subsurface" and 470 Gt C in "terrestrial". You can also see in their analysis that the huge biomass bias towards the land is due to plants and fungi, which overwhelmingly favour th…

They count trees as biomass (which is correct, but it's not really the fun part). If you only count the animals, the marine and deep subsurface surely is way more abundant than the terrestrial life.

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#117

Post by nicoburns »

chopin wrote: post #95
Joakal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick, article quotes scientists that talks about brain size relative to body being a factor in intelligence, not brain size alone.

I thought that always as a strange argument. Why would relative size matter for intelligence? At least if one thinks of compute capacity this shouldn't matter.

Because not all of the brain is 'compute'. Lots of it seens to be allocated to map 1:1 with body areas (or probably the number of nerves in those body areas). I guess you could see this as IO.

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#118

Post by nicoburns »

diminoten wrote: post #85
jaggednad wrote: post #37

One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for…

I sometimes feel like we talk about evolution wrong. Here, for example; it's not like gazelles couldn't take advantage of being smarter, there are plenty of advantages to be had if you can outsmart your predator, it's just that the smarter gazelles weren't ever smart enough for that to matter. It's more about if it's possible for minute intelligence improvements to produce higher survival chances. For a gazelle, the…

That's part of it, but there's also the fact that bigger brains qhoch lead to being smarter have downsides in terms of resource usage (needing to eat more, or reduce physical movement), which might not pay off for the smarter gazelles as it might make them slower and thus more likely to be eaten...

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#119

Post by rwmj »

tim333 wrote: post #109
speedplane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not luck, it's time. Evolution occurs so extraordinarily slowly, it's hard to comprehend. People are trying to create intelligence a million times faster than evolution did.

Well that's the usual view but it's based on random mutations so there must be some luck involved. A change of the make this muscle a bit bigger type may involve the equivalent of one bit flipping and so happen all the time but the mechanisms of intelligence may involve a much harder sequence to come up with. It's hard enough to program neural networks using code and tensor flow. Imagine having to do it by giving the…

Even a tiny bit of intelligence is useful if your competitors are all dumb. It starts from there.

Re: The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?

#120

Post by wongarsu »

chopin wrote: post #95
Joakal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick, article quotes scientists that talks about brain size relative to body being a factor in intelligence, not brain size alone.

I thought that always as a strange argument. Why would relative size matter for intelligence? At least if one thinks of compute capacity this shouldn't matter.

Both absolute size and relative size are poor approximations, but relative size gets closer.

Large animals aren't just scaled up versions of smaller animals. Large animals use the space for more complicated digestive tracts. Their larger appendices allow them to have more joints with more degrees of freedom, and longer appendices and higher speeds require a higher resolution from their eyes to perceive sufficient detail. Skin with more surface area also means many more cells for sensing heat, pressure, damage, etc across the entire skin.

All of this means the brain of a larger creature needs more "IO ports", more neurons to compute sensible outputs for them even for routine tasks, and more neurons to break the wealth of data into a form usable by a cognitive process or an instincutal reaction (mapping to area of body, computing averages over time and over multiple inputs, correlating different types of senses, etc).

All of these differences have different scaling factors. The amount of neurons to count to 5 stays the same, the amount of neurons to process skin sensations scales approximately with skin area, or the square of animal diameter, but the amount of neurons to control motor functions or the digestive tract can grow much faster. Overall, putting brain size in relation to animal size or mass is a decent first approximation and works in practice.

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