(www.smithsonianmag.com)
I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.
Based on the same logic, is it ethical to eat a human if they are mentally disabled or not passing some IQ test?
octopus passing a intelligence test does not keep it above the fold, neither does cattle go below the fold because they don't clear the bar (surprise, cattle are equally emotional, smart, curious etc.).
sounds wrong when I type it out but that is just the truth. milk is actually more ethically wrong when you think about it (isolating a calf from its mom to steal its food.)
doing one or the other does not absolve us. because one is more commonly accepted than the other
Precision-Fermented (animal-Free) milk does exist but it is not easily available.
Unfertilized eggs are products that come out anyway and cannot become a chick till it is successfully fertilized outside of the hen. Granted that these two are extracted industrially under not so nice conditions.
Waiting for good lab grown meat to become cheap.
> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level
I think it’s good to question these things but the people who go full black/white on everything is where that whole movement died. Saying something strong like “eating any meat” will generally not win over hackers. But “we won’t bring cows to Mars” might work better.
this is such a... wrong conclusion to make from the study. the study has found a correlation and by no means is it a causation. there are so many cultural, societal reasons for this to be the case. (eg. in india, upper caste people are usually vegetarians who generally have more access to education.)
the parent comment was basically creating a causational logic for why vegetarians are more likely to be "smart"-er. which is not true.
Also, what's your point? Is there a proven direct correlation between ethics/morals and educational level? And even if there were, does that imply that this less educated group is as a whole completely wrong? And are you implying that ethics and morals were even objective and measureable? I mean, completely no idea what you are getting at here.
Vegetarianism selects for openness and analytical/reflective thinking but the extra step to veganism selects for absolutism/purity and rigid category-based thinking. Reflective thinking and openness are definitely correlated to IQ so I believe the result in the article.
The point here is to know your audience. The people on this site are perfectly primed to respond well to a vegetarian/environmental point of view.
I don't follow how you conclude this at all. there is nothing to indicate this is the case.
I think this is very wrong. Doesn't account for when you don't have a choice, to be healthy. You need to eat more, you need to consider all possible situations, construction work people need to sustain all that physical labor somehow. It's a more serious chore to even attempt to build a non meat based diet, let alone sourcing everything.
If we could have a healthy alternative that accounts for everything (taste included) then maybe you can make that argument. Until then it's quite shortsighted and ignorant.
Lazy statement that “sourcing” a vegetarian meal is difficult.
Eating less meat is better for your health and better for the planet.
The few exceptions I think worth noting are if you were born into and continue to live in largely/culturally hunter culture (Inuit, bushmen) or where you live is not sustainable for agriculture (Tibet.)
Most folks could just cook more rice, beans, greens and be fine.
I'm suggesting the opposite.
by design eating meat is morally questionable. (as do so many things with our modern society.) all meat is fair game, because all animal dependent diet is questionable anyway.
And literally no vegan has a problem with people who medically need to eat meet doing so. I own several cats, they are carnivores. The problem is scale: The fact that some people medically must eat meat does not give a free pass for apathetic barbarism to the rest of society.
Even collectively cutting out a single meat or dairy-based meal a week would contribute to a massive reduction in demand. You have no excuse. Use this energy to build a fairer world for all animals instead of using it to get defensive whenever someone brings up how massively inhumane modern factory farming is.
But say for farmed cows, living in a field for a while, that's better than not existing at all. You cannot judge if it's worth it from the cow's perspective, it got to live, enjoy the sun, eating in the field, doing cow stuff, same as us. Even with the hardships in my life I'd rather have existed, for however long I can, than not existing at all.
So you see it's not as simple to look at and judge farming. If it was for you those animals wouldn't even have experienced this reality. It some cases you may be right, depending on their conditions obviously.
We justify everything we do.
I personally wouldn't eat meat if I had a good alternative. I rarely do, I eat it for health related reasons, considering my setup.
We also have a nervous system distributed throughout our bodies, so we do experience the full body, but the neural signals are sent to one location, not nine. We experience ourselves as a unified hole, allowing exceptions for certain conditions.
Mostly yes. But we do have some processing that bypasses the brain: reflexes for example. The classic example is the kick reflex that doctors test with a small mallet on your knee. Or when you blink as something flies towards your eyes. It happens and your brain gets informed afterwards.
But there are degrees of non-conscious processing, from the heart beating by itself and your guts doing their things, to the breath which will be on autopilot until you take control over it, to entirely voluntary things like moving about your limbs (for healthy individuals).
Maybe the octopuses experience their disconnected brains somewhere on that spectra, where the limbs are semi-autonomous unless it focuses on them? (All we can do is speculate, there is no known way to learn the qualia of being an octupus.)
Thank you for making me breath manually.
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Minds-Octopus-Origins-Conscious...
For an octopus, it must be something similar but with all 8 of their appendages. Some specialize for hunting vs moving, so that’s at least easy to understand, but given they can act independently, I wonder if the octopus feels like the conflict between gut and brain with respect to food.
Two other interesting aspects of cephalopods:
* Make many more changes to RNA than other invertebrates [2]
* Have only one type of light sensing cell in eyes, so may detect color by chromatic aberration
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds:_The_Octopus,_the_...
2. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/octopus-squid-rna-editin...
3. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...
- snakes have a high number of degrees of freedom but aren't especially bright
- squid have 2 more limbs than octopuses and aren't as smart
I think the shallow-water vs deep-water thing mentioned in the article is important; reef and similar environments give a lot more opportunities for smart camouflage, complex navigation, tool-use opportunities etc than the open ocean.
Maybe your headcannon should be that apes did a "tower of babel" type thing to make all the octopus individualistic and unable to organize into a civilization
[1] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
Almost all octopuses are cannibalistic but Abdopus have also been found living close to and tolerating each other
They don’t raise their offspring
> Although there is no direct evidence that the adaptation is linked to expanded octopus brainpower,
I.e. the entire connection between this mutation and octopus intelligence is made up. Not even a shred of justification.
A lot of science journalism has, for better or worse, a mandate to increase public interest and excitement about science. If you want a dry and totally accurate account of the science you should read the paper directly. If you want your curiosity and imagination excited, articles and programs like these are great.
Here's their proposed link later in the article:
> The findings hint that the rRNA adaptation might be connected to the evolution of the shallow-water octopuses’ large nervous systems. Their brains—which are spread throughout their bodies—had to expand quickly as they learned to keep up with predators and increased competition in this environment. Nerve cells, or neurons, are long-lived, study co-author Rishav Mitra tells Scientific American’s Cody Cottier, which means protein misfolding is particularly bad for them. By preventing that, the rRNA break “might help these neurons to work well,” he adds.
A conjecture like this probably has no place in a scientific article but absolutely has a place in pop sci magazines like Smithsonian
Oh boy! Please hurry up with this. I want brains in all my appendages so I can adapt in real time to all the environmental conditions that I am encountering moment to moment.
Test it first though, maybe on a rat or a planarian. Your choice.
EDIT: I know this is great research. Understanding how evolution has allowed other species to adapt to their environments and overcome conditions that would be dangerous helps us assemble the pieces of the puzzle of the origin of life. I just don't think that the first thing we should be considering when we find something that makes an organism unique is the question of how we can insert genetic change into the human genome. If humans had ever needed it the mutation would already be present through natural selection.
If the end game is always to modify the human genome then there is no reason to do the research on other organisms.
Set up the conditions with humans and run a few generations through. The ones who make it likely have some genetic difference that predisposes them to winning that part of life. No need to rush things. Do it once, do it right.