Nornagest comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 03 September 2014 09:37PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 05 September 2014 05:40:40PM *  4 points [-]

Also how long do dolphins and octopusses have time to come up with current human level intelligence until considered "filtered out"? I would recorn they would still have atleast a couple ten million years left.

We don't know much about the evolutionary history of octopuses -- they're practically nothing but soft parts and don't fossilize well -- so it's hard to say exactly how long the clade's been around. Our best guess is that they diverged from the vampyromorphs sometime in the Devonian, or ~360 mya (!), though of course octopuses of that era might not have been very smart.

Given the clade's modern diversity, though, octopuses seem likely to have been fairly intelligent as animals go for a very long time. That's suggestive of a soft filter of some sort; two possibilities might be their short lifespans (octopuses rarely make it five years, and die soon after mating) or the fact that they're largely solitary animals. Some squid, however, are more social.

Cetaceans are a much younger clade, having evolved from wolf-like ancestors (albeit more closely related to cows) in the Eocene. And their intelligence is probably younger still; if encephalization quotient is anything to go by, archaeocetes were dumb as rocks. Unfortunately, most cetacean species are poorly researched, cognitively speaking, so we can't nail down the evolutionary timeline with precision.

Comment author: Lumifer 05 September 2014 07:14:09PM *  4 points [-]

diverged from the vampyromorphs

That's an awesome name X-D

Even better, the sole living representative of the order is Vampyroteuthis infernalis, lit. "vampire squid of Hell", says Wikipedia.