Last year, speculative fiction author Ray Nayler published “The Mountain in the Sea,” his first novel, depicting a not-too-distant future in which humankind is faced with an awe-inspiring (and deeply disquieting) possibility: that our singular perch atop the evolutionary ladder may not be quite so singular after all. In the novel, a newly discovered community of hyper-intelligent octopuses off the coast of Vietnam developed its own advanced language and the ability to use complex tools.
While Nayler’s story is wholly fictional, it is not without basis in a very real school of zoological thought, one which holds that octopuses are indeed unique within the animal kingdom as we understand it today. So much so that they may be Earth’s next big species if ours ends up going the way of the dinosaurs.
‘Filling an ecological niche in a post-human world’
While an octopus-dominated future may seem “improbable” at the moment, it “wouldn’t be the first time that an ocean-dwelling species took advantage of a land species extinction to adapt and evolve,” Popular Mechanics said. That would namely be us humans, whose distant ancestors were initially aquatic before becoming land-based mammals.
Although birds and insects have demonstrated a capacity for complex thinking and tool usage, it’s octopuses that are a “potentially better candidate for filling an ecological niche in a post-human world,” Oxford University biologist Tim Coulson said to The European. They are some of the “most intelligent, adaptable and resourceful creatures on Earth,” and octopuses’ “advanced neural structure, decentralized nervous system and remarkable problem-solving skills” make certain types “well suited for an unpredictable world” under the right circumstances. They are even “capable of distinguishing between real and virtual objects, solving puzzles, interacting with their environment, handling intricate tools with their thumb-like tentacles, and thriving in a wide variety of habitats.”
‘Not likely to develop a culture’
Octopuses have certain biological features that could, under the right circumstances, place them at the top of the evolutionary heap, but there are a lot of variables involved that could waylay any hopes of an octo-centric future. Absent some dramatic, unforeseen evolutionary leap, “octopuses are still working from a snail blueprint, and there’s only so much you can do with that toolbox,” said biologist Culum Brown of Australia’s Macquarie University at The Conversation. Crucially, octopuses’ evolutionary prospects are “highly constrained by their very short life span,” with most living for “just a year and some as little as six months.”
Dexterity and problem-solving skills aside, octopuses are unlikely to create a “human-like society because of their social habits,” said University of Sydney Philosophy of Science Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith to Popular Mechanics. In large part, that’s because octopus parents are virtually non-existent in their babies’ lives, meaning that in order to develop anything resembling a “culture” as we understand it, they would need to evolve to foster “more intergenerational connections.” Given that octopuses have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years without those sorts of multi-generational cultural advantages, it’s “unlikely that this will change anytime soon,” the magazine said.
Conversely, however, octopuses’ “hasty reproduction and quick intellectual maturity” could give them an “advantage in rapidly changing environments, thereby accelerating their evolutionary progress,” Earth.com said. “These are just possibilities,” Coulson said to The European. “It’s impossible to predict with any degree of certainty how evolution will unfold over extended periods.”