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  • Hacker News
  • Correlation does not imply causation and it's not even clear this qualifies as correlation.
    by jjk166
  • what about it is not correlation, that you imply?
    by jjtheblunt
  • not sure I agree, they reconstituted this mutation in E coli ribosomes, using Fluc as a luminescence readout, and saw a reduction in aggregates at similar luminescence without a reduction in translation speeds.

    Not really familiar with translation machinery or luciferase, but it seems pretty compelling to me.

    by thelaxiankey
  • Can we CRISPR it into humans? I volunteer. I’ve always wanted to improve my protein folding accuracy.
    by piazz
  • Plus your pants would fit like a glove.
    by tclancy
  • lets splice in a gene fix for cephalopod senescence and get the invasion over with
    by yieldcrv
  • I have this headcanon that an ancient ape civilization was at war with cephalopods and they created a weapon of mass destruction that artificially gimped octopus lifespans :'(
    by Razengan
  • Pure, shameless clickbait as usual from Smithsonian magazine.

    > 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.

    by throw310822
  • That's a shame, because the study in itself is interesting and raises some questions, but the whole time I was wondering why protein translation accuracy would be related to intelligence? Turns out there is no evidence of link and that the title just speculates.
    by Otterly99
  • I mean it's a gene that helps them build a protein. It would be nearly impossible to say there's a "direct" link to that and intelligence. I think they are validly qualifying the article

    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

    by culi
  • I would imagine their intelligence is directly proportional to the so many degrees of freedom the arms have for grasping, but don't ask which one came first, chicken or egg?
    by fmjrey
  • why chicken or egg? it's way to imagine both evolving together in a mutually reinforcing relationship where the gains in one are direct incentives for the other to continue to evolve, etc
    by make3
  • most likely the enormous control surfaces their biology acquired required distributed neuronal mass and once that mass existed further intelligence became advantageous because it was a minor change at that point (switches during embryology increasing neuron counts and other aspects).
    by teravor
  • Why should intelligence _other_ than motor-planning be tied to the degrees of freedom of their movement?

    - 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.

    by abeppu
  • the history of how people have conceived of causality between human intelligence and human hands (and in which direction dependency may lie) is quite interesting. "It is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals." —Anaxagoras, circa 450 BCE.
    by pryce
  • Reminds me of the children of time books - think it’s the second book with the octopus
    by taf2
  • the mountain in the sea is also a good read. focuses specifically on ingredient octopus, I didn't enjoy it as much as children of time but still an interesting read.
    by jayGlow
  • Children of Ruin is about advanced Octopi, not as good as Children of Time, but interesting. That series or Fire Upon the Deep are really good for conceptualizing truly alien intelligence.
    by georgeecollins
  • What does it mean to “produce proteins with about twice their usual accuracy”? Smaller feature size, essentially?
    by pash
  • No biological process is 100% precise. DNA copying being imperfect is the driver of evolution, which is the prime example of this. What I assume they're referring to is that their ribosomes just "make fewer mistakes" when creating proteins from mRNA.

    These "mistranslated proteins" are normally infrequent and benign, and their material is recycled eventually. But that whole process wastes energy, so making a "better ribosome" makes all cellular processes more energy efficient and allows the energy budget to be reallocated.

    by treyd
  • It is a pity they have such a short lifespan
    by FpUser
  • If they lived longer they might develop complex social structures, and then we might be in trouble.
    by wahern
  • I found the article very interesting. Not click bait at all.

    I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.

    by BatFastard
  • > I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.

    Yep, distributed around, though with concentrations in some areas.

    They have a concentration of neurons in a sort of doughnut shape gathered around the mouth and oesophagus area, their gullet actually goes through the middle of their most dense brain area.

    Very large potential for ice-cream headaches right there.

    by Nursie
  • In some sense this (not as literally as this case, but in measurable scientific tests) is true for other species. Processing is demonstrated to be distributed through sense organs in the frog in What the Frogs Eye Tells the Frogs Brain https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065609, i.e. in frogs at least, the eye is not like a camera sending pixels to its brain
    by stevenwoo
  • Yep, they do some cognition in their arms. You also do some processing in your ears and your eyes. There is a lot of evidence that you learn to recognize certain stimulus in the neurons outside of the "brain".
    by georgeecollins
  • Should have read the Children of Time series (Adrian Tchaikovsky) ;)
    by teekert

  •   > I didn't realize that an octopuses brain was spread out all over its body.
    Our skin cells communicate in a neuron-like fashion, albeit much more slowly: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-found-the-silent-scr...
    by thesz
  • It's like 9 brains, one central one in the head and 8 semi-autonomous ones in the arms. Makes one wonder what an octopus consciousness is like. Is it distributed among the nine brains, or focused on the central one? If the latter then the arm-brains would be zombie minds. It's also possible the 8 arms have their own separate experiences.

    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.

    by goatlover
  • Not only that, they have the highest ratio of brain-to-body-mass of any invertebrate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence

    by ortusdux