Spineless Wonders

Octopus Intelligence Shakes Up Darwin’s Tree

The octopus presents a conundrum in animal intelligence: a highly intelligent invertebrate.

We used to live in a tidy world, where vertebrates, with backbones terminating in a brain, were more intelligent than invertebrates, which have a variety of nervous system layouts and structures (or, in many cases, little or none thereof). Mammals and birds are, of course, highly favored for intelligence because they are warm-blooded (endothermic), and the brain is a high metabolic area. The traditional “tree of intelligence” makes sense, actually.

But then we got to know the octopus.

A “Second Genesis”

Called by some a “second genesis of...