Monday, February 13, 2012

Interesting Links and Octopus vs Cancer

Here are a few items of interest:




I remember in High School, we had this discussion with our philosophy professor about the intelligence of animals. His take was that there really was no intelligence that came even close to that of the humans. Most of us were flabbergasted, because we felt that his point of view was disingenuous at best as it reflected more his need to continue on being a professor of philosophy than from any actual knowledge of the situation. Take for instance the case of the octopus. The following video is in french but it should not be too hard to understand (except when the aquarium folks tell the story that these octopuses besides spying on them, literally go from one aquarium to the next, go hunting for some fish there and then come back in their home aquarium).






A species that spies on us and display learning abilities beyond that of chimps, that would certainly qualify as getting close to human learning. Why am I talking about this ? I just read this entry on David Rosenthal's blog entitled Tide Pools and Terrorists and couldn't shake off the similarities between underestimating cancer cells (Cancer is just as deadly as it was 50 years ago. Here’s why that’s about to change.) and how smart octopuses are. The tentacles part is also striking. 





Source: National Cancer Institute.


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2 comments:

Laurent DUVAL said...

I am sorry i cannot find the video of a tale of two squids. One was teached putting cubes and other shapes in holes. The other is teached the same with his graduate pal aside. And without easy-to-spot communicate, the 2nd learns about 5-10 times faster. Should be somewhere in the depth of the web. Meanwhile, two vids, the second one with somebody we know.

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/animals/invertebrates-animals/octopus-and-squid/octopus_giant_kills_shark/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Q8dYZC9JU

Igor said...

Isn't it part of the same show ? Shold be here then

http://mai68.org/spip/spip.php?article1229

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