Our preference comes from one side of the brain dominating over the other-a sign of how the two sides of our brains are not identical. In the 1950s, for example, biologists demonstrated for the first time that octopuses have massive brains.įor example, one sign of the complexity of the human brain is that we can be left-handed or right-handed. We’ve accumulated so many and such incredible differences over that time that 20 th-century scientists were excited to discover a few deep similarities. Since then, our lineage evolved bones theirs evolved boneless bodies they control with water pressure.
Our most recent common ancestor, scientists suspect, was a little wormlike creature with eyespots and little more. You’d have to go back about 700 million years to find the moment in the history of life when humans and octopuses diverged. They are not intelligent in the way we are-not because they’re dumb but because their behavior is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution under radically different conditions than the ones under which our own brains evolved. But it would be a mistake to try to give octopuses an IQ score. Octopuses can learn, they can process complex information in their heads, and they can behave in equally complex ways. And if you’ve got a good definition, there are quite a few scientists who would love to hear it. So, is the octopus really all that smart? It depends on how you define intelligence.
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