Aug 022011
I am catching up with my reading of recent issues of New Scientist, which arrived all at once after our recent postal strike.
Cephalopods are smart. So smart in fact that they are tool users, the only invertebrates we know about that have this ability. Yet they evolved entirely differently from us, having split from us some half a billion years ago on the evolutionary tree. Some argue that cephalopods deserve extra protection; on the other hand, we don’t even know how to anesthetize them properly.
I also wonder if the SETI folks are taking notice. We think we are so smart that we can talk to aliens? How about learning first how to communicate with a giant squid. Compared to aliens, these guys are our cousins after all.