[_ptgt]

While satirical, this doesn’t really make sense as an answer to question at hand. Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. There are some limits to this — humans in many cases clearly have other goals — but it should be true to a large extent. The wheel, New York, and wars are pretty clearly aligned with this goal.

If the octopus possessed sufficient intelligence, something along the lines of an octopus city would presumably be in the cards. Or if they do possess such intelligence, the question again is why not form civilizations (which would presumably boost survival and fertility rates)?

[Timpy]

> Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction.

I disagree with this. Intelligence will only further survival and reproduction if it helps whatever selective pressures the population is under. Livestock are a good example, they were selected to be less intelligent. You're wrongly assuming that the goals of natural selection align with human goals. The only goal of natural selection is gene propagation. In this endeavor, chickens are much more successful. They outnumber humans, humans supply them with food, humans protect them from natural predators. Who are we to say "the only measure of success is a human-like civilization"?

[dTal]

Note that the parent did not say "survival and reproduction will select for intelligence". They said, intelligence if possessed will be put to that use. Livestock may be dumb, but males will still sneak out of their enclosure to mate with the herd, if they can figure out how.

The implication is that if octopuses could make technology, pass on culture etc, they would.

[Timpy]

Right, that's how I read it the first time, and that's exactly the point I aim to refute. Imagine a sheep that is sneaking out of their enclosure. Either they manage to mate, or the human catches them and deems them too unruly to mate and a more docile sheep is selected. Either way, the enclosure is reinforced and unruly sheep are phased out of the population.

The most correct statement would be intelligence, if possessed && if it makes the specimen more selective, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction. Countless animals don't rely on intelligence for gene propagation, and wouldn't achieve higher reproductive rates from higher intelligence. Big brains are resource intensive, birds and ants are doing just fine at the natural selection game without high intelligence, technology, culture, or civilization.

[KineticLensman]

> Countless animals don't rely on intelligence for gene propagation

Also true of countless humans

[bduerst]

Octopodes have their own evolutionary barriers though, irrespective of intelligence:

- They only typically live 4 years and the act of reproducing kills them

- They live in coastal ocean biomes, which have high selective pressures

In order for intelligence to flourish, a form of communication is needed and the method to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. An octopus is a solitary organism, unlike mammals which are tribal. It does not live long enough to develop social skills or to transfer knowledge to their offspring, so there isn't any accumulation of information for their species to build cities or technologies. Each individual is forced to self educate and re learn survival.

Your criteria for intelligence is more criteria for safe habitat than intelligence. Just because they don't live long enough to learn language or write books doesn't mean they are not intelligent.

[mnem]

There are actually a very small number of octopus "cities". For one, see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...

I highly recommend "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" for a fascinating look at octopus evolution and comparison to ourselves.

[aleksei]

Octopuses have been around for 300 million years, I think they've got survival and reproduction covered at this point. I would be careful of conflating shared culture with intelligence, especially in this context given octopuses are mainly solitary.

[bluGill]

Would they though? cities allow close contact often which allows disease to spread thus wiping them out. Eventually you create sanitation, medication and such. It is a long time from intelligence to designing sanitation and medical systems. If you skip all that by avoiding close contact...

[thenewwazoo]

If "intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction" were axiomatic, human populations would never decline for any reason other than accidental death, disease, etc. That's not true, however. As standards of living increase, birth rates voluntarily decline until populations shrink. People aren't getting dumber and somehow failing to reproduce as often, but instead are using that intelligence to choose not to reproduce.

Perhaps octopodes are making the same choice?

[thaumaturgy]

This is a common misconception about evolution and natural selection [1]. Evolution doesn't have an "arrow", or direction, and it doesn't necessarily lead to any kind of improvements at all. Natural selection merely means that the least healthy individuals of a species will be less likely to pass on their genes. Intelligence likewise will not necessarily be put to any kind of use at all.

The evolution of human intelligence is still a delightfully big, open question in science, but the current thinking is converging on it being, well, as Bob Ross might have put it, a "happy little accident". Researchers have been able to track the development of the human brain through the varying sizes of a hole in fossilized hominid skulls [2]. Brains are massive caloric sinks and require a lot of food, rich in animal fats, to be able to develop. [3] Meanwhile, just a short time ago in evolutionary terms, humans accidentally developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood [4], and we got overall bigger, stronger, and healthier -- but our hungry brains also got a new source of nutrients.

The jury is still out on exactly what evolutionary advantage our brains confer, if any [5]. So, it is possible that human-level intelligence is not an evolutionary advantage at all. There are after all numerous species at the top of their respective food chains, evolving much more slowly, that could be considered successful in evolutionary terms. And, given the caloric requirements of large brains and the unclear advantages that they produce, they could maybe be viewed as a disadvantage.

If we were to view brains as, well, a kind of tumor of sorts, that will simply grow and develop depending on caloric availability, then perhaps humans developed agriculture because our brains were hungry and civilization because our brains got bored, and all of this was only possible because we accidentally developed the ability to digest lactose as adults, and none of it is a necessary consequence of evolution at all.

This btw is one of the major components to my favorite answer for the Fermi Paradox.

[1]: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq...

[2]: http://theconversation.com/how-our-species-got-smarter-throu...

[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sorry... (I don't love the headline on this article, but the content is okay.)

[4]: https://slate.com/technology/2012/10/evolution-of-lactose-to...

[5]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/the-evolutionary-mys...

[megaremote]

> Natural selection dictates that intelligence, if possessed, will be put to use to further survival and reproduction.

Hows that working out for us, with us poisoning the world and global warming coming?