I’ve never understood the appeal of spaceflight and ETs. Sciencey nerds are supposed to be fascinated by planets and stars and endless space. Nope. Give me creeks and houses and streets and people. I’d rather look about me, take hold of the things that are here, talk to them and let them talk to me.
Why are we continuing to spend trillions on NASA when we can see everything we need to see with telescopes? Why are we speculating about alien life forms when we’ve got alien intelligences right here?
Octopuses and cuttlefish are extremely intelligent, with a totally different origin than our familiar vertebrates. Every new piece of research finds a new parallel.
This research from Italy looks at the multi-sensory forms of cuttlefish communication. It finds a complex gestural language along with the already partly known color language, and finds that cuttlefish can understand gestures when shown a video of their own gestures on TV.
Most interesting, cuttlefish seem to use tentacle gestures to broadcast at long distances via pressure vibrations in the water. It isn’t exactly sound, since the waves are only one or two per second; it’s more like the “ear to the ground” communication by thumps that some pre-literate people used. They also understand audio replays of their own gestures, heard on underwater speakers.
Cuttlefish seem confused when the recordings are reversed or jumbled, so the sequence of gestures is important. Birds and humans have sequential languages. Other mammals have single words. Barks, howls, growls and whimpers are different words, but a dog doesn’t form sentences like “Bark howl howl growl”. Cuttlefish now join the language club.
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Hearing is performed by the lateral line of sensors along each side of the body, similar to fish. Marine animals use the lateral line to hear sound in the usual range along with slower vibrations. And some mud-dwelling fish have a similar organ to receive radio waves, along with a tuned antenna to send radio.
The lateral line in fish comes from the same genetic purpose as our cochlea, and the structure is exactly parallel. Here’s a closeup of several hair cells on a lateral line. Each cell is embedded in the skin. Hairs wiggle with water movement, and the skin also participates by moving the sensor relative to water.
Here’s my cross section of our cochlea. The sensing hair cells are embedded in the basilar membrane, and they sense the motion of the fluid between the two membranes, as well as the motion of the basilar membrane itself.
Because we don’t live in water, we need an extra translation mechanism to convert air vibrations to liquid vibrations. The eardrum and the little bones called ossicles pick up sound from air and push it into the liquid of the cochlea like a piston, where the rest of the process is similar to fish. The vibrations travel through the liquid, pushing the basilar membrane up and down, same as water along the lateral line. Pressure in the liquid is changing, and the membrane containing the sensory cells is wiggling in sync.
It’s fairly easy to see the transitions** between fish and vertebrates, and easy to imagine a single gene building both. It’s much harder to imagine why the same gene, controlling the same structures, appears in totally unrelated mollusks. Other mollusks are vastly less intelligent. Snails and clams are simple compared to cuttlefish and vertebrates.
In both cases the PURPOSE of the gene is language, and it builds brain structures and brain functions along with the lateral line and cochlea structures to accomplish language.
The article calls it convergent evolution. I talk like Charles Nash, not Charles Darwin, so I call it amortizing existing tooling. God wanted intelligent creatures to understand each other in both closeup and broadcast styles, so God reused the tooling.
LIFE IS PURPOSE.
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Sidenote: It’s apparently possible, though difficult and expensive, to keep small cuttlefish in a home aquarium.
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** The cochlea in amphibians is mostly straight, starting to curl. In fully land-based vertebrates it’s curled like a snail. Cochlea means snail, as in Cockles and Mussels. And that brings us back to snails and clams.
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