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Did Octopuses Come From Outer Space?
A scientific paper, originally published in March, from peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology has found its way in this week's news-cycle. The paper, which is co-written by 33 authors including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggests that octopuses could be aliens, adding legitimacy to a belief, which otherwise has been debunked several times in the recent years.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
No. Next question!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
that's what they told me. octopi don't lie.
Will anybody speak for the Calamari?
Or even the Cuttlefish...
......
while (1) {
printf("Bahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. *wheeze* hahahahahahahaha *snort*.\n");
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Not really...
It was published in error. It was published 13 March 2018 but it was supposed to be published on 1 April 2018. It was supposed to be held for a couple of more weeks.
"Octopi" would be Latin. But "Octopus" is a Greek word!
"Octopodes" would be a Greek plural for the word....
But we don't use that because we are speaking ENGLISH, in which the correct plural is "Octopuses."
Don't believe me? Google it. Proof comes right up at the top of the results.
Poof! Next swirly question!
They dont just come from mexico
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As much as I fantasise about panspermia, I just don't think the evolutionary path would have developed elsewhere when we all evolved very similar traits.
Apart from death, what known mechanisms, if any, are there for feedback from the living animal to it's DNA confirming success to any particular 'deliberate/known' mutation from a previous generation to occur and bolster fitness for the next generation?
Is there any part of the DNA which accounts for 'R&D', like my previous question, which won't affect the host too drastically?
Is it possible that cephalopods have an advanced state to the "norm" because it evolved a technique to rapidly "prototype" more quickly because of an advanced feedback loop?
How does this get through peer review with 33 co-authors? I didn't even take a University level biology course and I can tell it's BS.
We can look at the DNA and RNA of Octupuses, we can tell we share common ancestors, if Octopuses came from another planet that would be really really obvious.
WTF? Do they think some Aliens abducted some cuttlefish, cloned them, and then dropped them back on the planet in Octopus form before heading on their way?
I stole this Sig
Perfect example of: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
That was easy.
NEXT!
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Whenever I have a question about our cephalopod superiors I refer to Pharyngula. https://freethoughtblogs.com/p...
That's utterly ridiculous, as even basic high school science can tell you: there are numerous genes that are common to all animals, including octopuses; many of those evolved on earth long before octopuses. Even the eukaryotic cell itself is an idiosyncratic assembly of bacterial components, membranes, and genomes, something that is shared between octopuses and all other higher animals, and that would simply not have arisen the same way elsewhere.
The only way this could work is if life in the galaxy were in constant exchange everywhere so that life on all life bearing planets in the galaxy shares the same evolutionary history and that history is synchronized.
ur anus
... since when did papers becomes the new platform for fake news and pure speculation.
You made that up, didn'tcha?
Ya R'lyeh.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Check out the specifics of their Ribosomes and the genetic structure of their mitochondria. If those are near standard, then the answer has to be no. If they're wildly at variance with everyone else, I'll consider the possibility.
Even then, it would take considerable proof, because the encoding of amino acids by RNA looks as if it should be arbitrary. (This is actually a sub-comment under "specifics of their Ribosomes", but it's significant enough that I thought it rated a separate mention.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Intelligent alien 1: "Hey, lets shoot these kind of intelligent animal eggs at a habitable planet and make sure they land safely so they'll spread there!"
Intelligent alien 2: "Dude, why?"
Intelligent alien 1: "Cause it's a fun prank! C'mon, don't be a buzzkill."
An aquatic environment is certainly the first place I would think that an intellectual species would master the art of designing, building, and launching really big rocket motors. Its just natural to think this. After all, electrical production, machinery, and autonomous transportation is so easy to come by in the natural world, especially those species capable of doing all that under water, where the fuel to power that kind of industry burns so well. /s
however I am beginning wonder about some scientists.
In the linked Cosmos article there is this quote from one of the authors:
The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time – most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo". Referring to the Galileo affair is among science crackpoterry something like Godwin's law in Internet discussions
...
but it's aliens
-The Authors
Oops, sorry... I ignored the subject rather than the message. My bad. Iâ(TM)ll try harder next time. Promise.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
The OctoPi. It's out of this world.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Thank goodness that mutant thing finally died"
LOL
-33- authors... tells me all I need to know. I watched the Octopus Volcano documentary this morning and I could buy an off-world DNA explanation of these fascinating creatures.
Once again, anything not immediately accepted by the esteemed academic echo chamber is looked at is being crazy.
It never hurts to re-explore and think different. This reminds of the Rupert Sheldrake's banned TED talk, https://youtu.be/JKHUaNAxsTg
As Sheldrake states, "free inquiry is the very lifeblood of scientific endeavor"
I applaud a person willing to "rethink" what we think we already know.
I think Mark Twain said it best, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it is was you know for sure and you're wrong about, that's what gets you in trouble."
All hail the Great Old Ones.
Purge the xenos.
From the linked LiveScience commentary:
Other researchers were not quick to embrace this theory. "There's no question, early biology is fascinating — but I think this, if anything, is counterproductive," Ken Stedman, a virologist and professor of biology at Portland State University, told Live Science. "Many of the claims in this paper are beyond speculative, and not even really looking at the literature."
For example, Stedman said, the octopus genome was mapped in 2015. While it indeed contained many surprises, one relevant finding was that octopus nervous system genes split from the squid's only around 135 million years ago — long after the Cambrian explosion.
Well, this is looks to be a problem for this hypothesis.
So I decided to look into this a bit more so I downloaded the paper (which was in "accepted manuscript form" not as published paper) and look up some of its references. A key one is cited in the paper as (Liscovitch-Brauer et al 2017), for which the actual citation reference does not exist in the manuscript. I did find the paper though: Cell. 2017 Apr 6;169(2):191-202.e11. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.03.025, "Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods"
It includes this helpful paragraph (without the Wickramasinghe mumbo-jumbo inserted in the discussion):
Cephalopods are diverse and can be divided into the behaviorally complex coleoids, consisting of squid, cuttlefish, and octopus, and the more primitive nautiloids. In this paper we show that in neural transcriptomes extensive A-to-I RNA editing is observed in the behaviorally complex coleoid cephalopods but not in nautilus. The edited transcripts are translated into protein isoforms with modified functional properties. By comparing editing across coleoid taxa, we found that, unlike the case for mammals, many sites are highly conserved across the lineage and undergo positive selection, resulting in a sizable slow-down of coleoid genome evolution.
So the cephalopods are quite unusual, with a different approach to evolution starting with the cuttlefish (long before the octopus) with RNA editing taking precedence over DNA modification for evolution. This is very interesting.
The Liscovitch-Brauer paper also helpfully explains:
Cephalopods emerged in the late Cambrian period, roughly at 530 million years ago (mya), and the divergence of nautiloids from coleoides is estimated to have occurred at 350–480 mya. The coleoides diverged to Vampyropoda (octopus lineage) and the Decabrachia (squid and cuttlefish lineage) at 200–350 mya. Divergence of squid from Sepiida is estimated to have occurred at 120–220 mya.
So, a different approach to adapting to evolutionary pressure developed in the coleoides 350–480 mya (i.e. after splitting off from the nautoloids), which is 50-100 million years after the end of the Cambrian, and 60-110 million years after the Cambrian explosion (541 mya), and was in existence by the time that squid and octopus line separated (200-350 mya after the Cambrian explosion).
This is an enormous span of time, and no reason to suppose that alien genes imported at the Cambrian explosion started showing up in coleoides well over 100 million years later. Where were they hiding all that time?
The Wickramasinghe paper cites this anomalous biology of cephaloides, and then jumps to the conclusion "therefore aliens (maybe)".
They got their paper published, but I don't buy it.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Being crazy is not evidence.
Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
I have actually *seen* an octopus (well a picture of one). Hey, it's pretty obvious they are alien. Anyone in *your* family look like that? Them little buggers are just waitin' for the Trump wars to wipe us out and they will take over the earth.
Oh, you have doubts? Well no less an authority than the Simpsons people will straighten you out. Check out Kang and Kodos on Wikipaedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (have you had your rectal probe today?)
...omphaloskepsis often...
Too bad I can't edit to add an addendum.
What Wickramasinghe et al has done with the octopus is a slightly more sophisticated version of a game that creationists play.
All this stuff about "camera-like eyes", advanced nervous systems, color-changing etc. being so, so different from the nautilus that it is probably "aliens", is similar to the incredulity creationists express to show that evolution is impossible. The key difference (and the one they emphasize heavily) is the evolution by RNA editing that cephaloids developed. That is unusual, and seems to have developed once and only in the lineage (as far as we know at present).
But they octopuses did not get "camera-like eyes", advanced nervous systems, color-changing from "aliens" -otherwise the cuttlefish would have them too. If anything they just got that RNA mechanism. All that other stuff they evolved on their own. The octopus had at least 130 million years to evolve those advanced traits after splitting off from nautiloids, and perhaps as much as 360 million!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
They came from the Sushi Planet.
While there are eggs of relatively simple organisms that survive freezing, they don't survive *decades or millennia or interstellar, 3 degree Kelvin temperatures in vacuum*. New ideas are great, but building up fairy castles from ignorant ideas and expecting them to be taken seriously is not.
> It never hurts to re-explore and think different.
I's a waste of time and resources to think differently for an extended period when the "thinking differently" produces no insights. I've examined the TED Talk you referred to. I'm afraid that it's horrible. I'm afraid that there was not even a single 6 minute period, anywhere in his talk, in which he did not commit the "straw man" logical fallacy.
I agree that re-examining assumptions, and revisiting underlying assumptions, can be invaluable. There are too many situations where the opacity of a layer of abstraction have concealed a critical factor in my career and in my own fields of expertise. But just because an idea violates a long-held belief is not a reason to _support_ it, unless it provides testable or verifiable predictions, predictions that are superior to those of the existing approach.
Englisn, Latin or Greek plural.
I have never seen an Ancient Aliens episode on octopuses from outer space, therefore it can't be true.
If there is a large evolutionary difference between the octopus and its nearest relative we can seach for the missing links in the fossil record. Oops. No bones.
The best candidate for extraterrestrial origin is spiders (arachnids). Those suckers are just plain evil and weird. They don't belong here.
And thanks for all the prawns!
How do we know that it's suddenly? The lack of bones means we can't tell how the internal structure of cephalopods changed over the first 100 million years.
The real question is, "Did Slashdot's editors come from the Weekly World News ... ?"
Check out my novel.
I'm going to just go out on a limb and say that we have no idea about civilizations that came before ours, millions of years ago, as there is no fossil record going back that far. We keep thinking in terms of land, but what about water? Whales have been here too, maybe we evolved from whales?
At any rate, Octopi are only alien in the context if the ocean disappeared in the billion or so years and came back. Otherwise they may have been here for a billion years.
I mostly watch his atheist videos but he talks about Creationists obsession with the eye and how octopus evolved in an easy to understand video geared for children.
He is an excellent teacher but he talks about ancestors to modern octopuses by the eye differences.
http://saveie6.com/
I think I saw this in the National Enquirer last time I was in a grocery store, so it must be true!
Seconded. Chandra Wickramasinghe is a one-trick pony whose answer to absolutely everything is panspermia. (life from space)
Bravo for engaging in honest skepticism of the claims.
And yet, many people here calling out this study will not use the same level of skepticism about AGW claims of impending disaster if we don't engage in massive upheavals in society, technology, industry, and standards of living across the board that *just happen* to fit certain political agendas so perfectly that one might suspect shenanigans.
Fascinating, indeed.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"It has also looked into the background of some of the authors" - why? Either the paper contains the evidence which justifies their claim or it doesn't, I don't care about what authors have previously done - either they're citing or they aren't.
...with the combination of 33,000 genes (humans have about 20,000 genes) everything you get is just an octopus ? Not a big result, for an alien.
Isn't it obvious that the octopus is just a divinely-inspired water-based homage?
Octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus are all related as cephalopods. They are in the same phylum as snails and slugs on land, and things like nudibranchs underwater,
Their ancestors are things like ammonites, and it really shouldn't take a genius to spot how ammonites and nautilus could be related, and whilst I accept convergent evolution can trick the eye when trying to judge descendants, it's not merely convergent evolution in this case.
So we basically have a fossil record going right back to the beginning for octopus and their closely related cousins along with a a healthy fossil record - I could literally drive to a coast line like Plymouth in the UK right now and find an ammonite fossil or imprint in about an hour or two of arrival. In fact, I suspect we have a more complete fossil record for cephalopods and their ancestors such as ammonites than we do for humans.
Octopus are weirdly intelligent compared to much other life on earth, though I've always found them incredibly shy (and boring) in the wild. Much more interesting are cuttlefish and squid that will actually swim up to you, staring at you curiously, trying to understand you. If you approach they'll back away, staying never less than a meter from you, but if you back off they'll stay close to you, watching you. It's a clear form of intelligence that you just don't see in much else in the wild other than things like apes and whales. But we're also weirdly intelligent, and that doesn't make us alien, it just makes evolution an awesome force of nature.
They are very different than animals, and just suspiciously stand around doing nothing all day.
I, for one, welcome our new octopodic overlords.
No one has any problem with outside theories, as long as they're backed by evidence.
But when you bullshit, fudge, ignore scientific evidence that's inconvenient to your agenda and so on, and so forth, then yes, expect to get shot down.
The very fact we have technological progress at the fastest rate in human history is evidence that outside theories are accepted and acknowledged, but only when they have a plausible backing behind them.
Sheldrake wasn't banned, in fact, his video is on the TED site, it was just pointed out that it's based on a lot of bullshit, that's just fundamentally untrue, and his arguments are themselves based on a fundamental lack of scientific understanding - he's ignorant of even graduate level philosophy and mathematics, and it was just an attempt to push anti-scientific religious dogma into scientific debate by the backdoor.
So feel free to re-think, just when you're re-think consider that you might be wrong, and when you re-think and fail to back it up with evidence, rather than assuming the world is out to get you, and everyone is trying to silence you, that perhaps the problem is simply that whilst your attempt to think differently was noble, it was ultimately fruitless and wrong, as is the case both here, and with Rupert Sheldrake.
Now taking bets on how many cthulu references will be made on this article.
They should be fucking ashamed. Dickheads.
No.
Well, I played with a few octopuses they behaved a bit like dogs, they were curious and and came to me and put their arms around my hand. (Mediterranean sea, Greece)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The Correct Plural of Octopus from an authoritative source - Merriam Webster https://youtu.be/n4PWP8uL-1o
It's probably an April's fools. Octopuses were a while ago reported as having such different genetics they could be perceived as aliens. This was a bit of an exaggeration in some respects.
Probably for April's fools someone published the paper as a joke but it's only just gotten noticed/gone through.
Cuttlefish may not be able to camouflage like an octopus but they sure as hell change color, they're like living LCD screens.
Seriously, why?
Cuttlefish can most definitely camouflage as well as octopuses, in fact they can change match the color of their backgrounds in almost complete darkness. https://news.nationalgeographi...
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
While YOU, yes you with that weird stick inside your body and a remarkably low number of appendages, are the invaders from outer space.
Get off our planet.
chthulhu did it for a (menacing,evil) laugh
All too often though, like dogs, it's a taught behaviour by local dive guides, and divers. You see a similar thing with sharks- normally they want nothing to do with you and the most you'll see is the silhouette of one at the edge of visibility in the water. When you see video of sharks interacting with divers and brushing against them it's typically because of them having been baited and trained to associate divers with chum.
For what it's worth, I've even seen French angelfish trained to interact with people. A lady called Dee Scarr in Bonaire had a pair she'd trained which would approach her specifically when she entered the water and swam to the area they would hang around, but much as with the sharks and chum she did this by feeding them. People have done similar things with moray eels and the like, and lost their fingers as a result, such as the guy who had his thumb bitten off because a large moray mistook it for the sausage the guy would always feed it.
Ocean animals that will interact of their own free will with no training often include mammals - seals, sea lions, dolphins. You can witness this because even newly born seals who would not have seen people before will approach and play with humans. In fact, it's the older bulls that are basically horse sized (minus the legs) and could snap a human in two that prefer to keep their distance.
Then as I say there's the squid and cuttlefish, the reason I see these as being more interesting than my experience with octopodes so far is that the behaviours I see - the following and observation of people from a distance, would seem like a hard thing to train, but not only that, but I've witnessed many times across the globe. As such it would seem unlikely this curiosity they show would have been trained into so many different specimens across the globe - in contrast given the tourist draw of octopus interactions, and the relative ease of training that I believe it's more often likely to be a taught trait. This doesn't mean I think the naturally curious octopus is a myth, I think they're more than capable of it, but I think it's a relatively rare thing, at least far more so than the often sold idea that octopus will always just come right upto you and play with you - that's fundamentally not true (and probably a good thing, we don't need people dying to blue ringed octopus because it got frisky and bit them when they were playing with it).
The other interesting thing about squid and cuttlefish is that they'll try and communicate with you by flashing various colours at you when they approach you, or also if you move your fingers about, such as mimicking their attack pose by lifting your middle 3 fingers and lowering your thumb and little finger. They see this as their attack pose and will match it quite often. It's still very basic, but it's much more non-trivial communication than you get with many other species.
A Greek word with Latin endings? Sounds as implausible as the octopus evolving on Earth. Clearly, the word we use for them come from outer space too.
On the other hand, this can also be seen as scientific validation of creationism.
Of course, if you have already decided that "any evidence that points to God must be definition be false," which is, sadly, often the case, then you aren't doing actual science.
however, spiders definitely are extraterrestrial.
This is nonsense. My God, what the hell is happening? When did critical thought dwindle to such short supply? There's an increase in "flat earthers", vaccination causing autism won't die, 1/2 America doesn't believe global warming is caused by man... 50 years ago we reveled in science and the potential it offered. Today we can't even have a public debate at college lest someone feels "offended".
How to delete a /. post, anyone?
How the fuck did this end up being posted. I've never heard of such nonsense. Even the fact that we can measure genetic divergence should be a good indication that octopi are clearly terrestrial in origin.
DELETE THIS CRAP
This sig is false.
Great comment, thank you.
The sheer scale of these changes leads the authors to conclude that it cannot be explained by normal neo-Darwinian processes.
So they don't understand how octopi could change that quickly, and rather than thinking maybe there's something about evolution or genetics that we don't understand yet that could explain this, they decide they must have come from outer space. Wow.
As Ben Stein documented extensively in Expelled, the important thing is that this claim enhances the ability of researchers to find new frontiers of grants and funding and that Charles Darwin comes out looking like the smartest, handsomest guy they can put in front of young peoples' eyes.
Things just don't go well...
" But just because an idea violates a long-held belief is not a reason to _support_ it, unless it provides testable or verifiable predictions, predictions that are superior to those of the existing approach." Kinda yes, kinda no. The problem is that much of our understanding has had sooo much "patch work" done on top of it to explain edge cases. In the short term an OK idea that has had 50 years of patch work, may out perform a better idea that has only had 2 years of patch work. In order to create a fundamental shift in paradigms, we may need to entertain underperforming theories for substantial time, before the necessary patchwork can be developed to really make them shine.
While I acknowledge the truth of what you say, if they were to demonstrate that Octopuses used something other than mitochondria, or that their Ribosomes used a different mapping of nucleotide code to amino acid, I'd be willing to consider that they came from outside.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's not April 1 any more, is it?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
No one can call the Japanese xenophobic anymore.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn!
I guess the point is at what point did they come from outside if they did? If they did, the fossil record, and genetic ancestry would imply that basically everything came from outside, precisely because we can already trace their ancestry back so far.
I'd argue therefore, that the real problem with this theory is not saying that Octopus came from elsewhere, but that because Octopus have a fairly clearly well understood ancestry, that basically everything must've come from elsewhere, and in that case, why focus the paper on octopodes specifically? It really doesn't make much sense. If the author wants to argue that only some of life came from elsewhere, then even something like humans (where we still to some degree have a missing link) and duck billed platypus (where we're still filling the gaps) would be better candidates for this particular panspermia theory. This would at least have allowed the author to paper over some of the outright factually incorrect parts of his theory with unknowns instead.
I suspect therefore the most plausible explanation is that he's chosen octopodes because they fulfil many human's preconceived notions of what alien life forms would be like, and is mostly pandering to that as a way to push his scientific theory rather than, you know, doing real actual science.
The reviewers of this supposedly peer-reviewed paper have done a sloppy job. There are genome sequences available that clearly show that cephalopods are mollucs, which are bilaterians and thus relatively close to us. A truly alien organism would be less related to us than bacteria are.
If they didn't come from outer space then how do you explain Kang and Kodos on the Simpsons that are clearly evolved from the octopus family?
In a lot of sci-fi, there's this idea that DNA is some sort of universal constant that all life shares. But there's no reason whatsoever to believe that this should be the case. At the very least, we would expect massive divergences in basic cellular functionality such as the relationship between DNA basis and amino acids and which specific proteins cause various things to happen.
Lots of DNA studies performed these days make use of PCR, which essentially causes a few DNA strands to replicate, resulting in a much larger signal that's easier to measure. The problem is: the way it causes those strands to replicate is to apply a specific protein to the DNA strand and perform some temperature cycling. But why should the protein which performs this task on terrestrial DNA do anything at all to an extra-terrestrial DNA-like molecule? It could easily not combine at all, or not do it very efficiently, or do something completely unexpected like cut up the DNA-like molecule, rendering it useless.
If a DNA study was successfully performed on the organism, it's from Earth.
They came from Yanni, I mean Laurel.
Table-ized A.I.
Panspermia is, to me, a manner of evacuating any ambition of explaining Life towards an unreachable, outwards source.
'coming from outer space millions of years ago' = 'created by a God', for that matter.
That's the weakminded solution : modifying our view of the world so that answers to your questions become impossible by design, if I dare say.
My main fear is to discover the same process at work within closer, more critical analyses (economy, science, even ethics...). It's difficult to discernate.
Herve S.
I don't think they were somehow trained.
They sat in small ponds, "connected" to the sea. But depending on tides (it was mediterranean sea, the tide is usually not really visible, about 20cm or so) they could swim into or out of the pond. Or they climbed over the barrier.
It was more likely that they wanted to play because I came there every day, to put my feet into the water and read a book.
When I saw them the first time, they immediately hid. When I came to the pond I usually could not spot them at first, but while reading I saw them out of the corner of my eye sometimes. After a while they approached (a few days later).
Happend two times more or less in the same way in the same area of south Crete.
But your diving story is interesting, perhaps I should learn diving. When I was first time in Thailand, I spent a month on Phuket, but only used diving mask and snorkel a day before I left. What a shock. The amount of fish around me was unbelievable. Like in an aquarium of a Chinese restaurant. I literally had hundreds of fish at the same time in my viewing field. Just a few yards away from the beach.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Maybe the ancestors of the octopi later became the Thermians. The resemblance is certainly striking: http://galaxyquest.wikia.com/w...
Yep, I'd definitely recommend everyone who has the opportunity to learns to dive, apart from being incredibly relaxing because the mammalian dive reflex physically causes the heart to slow down (some free diver's pulses have been measured dropping to as low as 5 beats per minute!) it's also overwhelming the amount of things going on down there as you say.
I think what fascinates me as someone who is interested in evolution and the natural world is how much is different, and yet how much is the same. Even staring into the throat of a moray eel I couldn't help but notice how it's warning sign of widely baring it's teeth, and it's palate and teeth were so similar to that of a dogs - a completely different branch of the evolutionary tree evolving separately in a completely different environment and completely different conditions. Also the similarities between coral, a type of animal, and cacti, a type of plant even in terms of how you can cut them up, and grow new pieces, graft them, and so on were surprising to me.
It's both fascinating and eery to see things so alien, yet exhibiting traits and actions so familiar. It strengthens my suspicion that whilst the natural world is a big and complex thing, there are a massive but ultimately finite set of outcomes that natural process will reach that are governed by the fundamental laws, not just the physical laws such as those that govern the forces, but of natural laws such as evolution. I think therefore if we ever do find alien life it wouldn't be surprising if it's actually way more familiar in many ways and way less different than some might expect.
But even outside of the fascination of science and the underwater world, just the simple act of watching a manta, or spotted eagle ray gliding by you, or a turtle brushing past you, or even something common and trivial like a trumpet fish swimming under or above you using you as cover to move about the reef is an incredible experience. It's amazing how quickly you can become just another part of the reef. Though even where there's little to no life at all, like diving between the Eurasian and North America tectonic plates at Silfra in Iceland is a surreal (albeit cold) experience too.
Very informative, thank you for your work.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"