Did Octopuses Come From Outer Space? 256
A scientific paper, originally published in March, from peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology has found its way in this week's news-cycle. The paper, which is co-written by 33 authors including molecular immunologist Edward Steele and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggests that octopuses could be aliens, adding legitimacy to a belief, which otherwise has been debunked several times in the recent years.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
An excerpt from the paper, which makes the bold claim: The genetic divergence of Octopus from its ancestral coleoid sub-class is very great ... Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch color and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene. [...] It is plausible then to suggest they [octopuses] seem to be borrowed from a far distant 'future' in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large."Ephrat Livni of Quartz questions the basis of the finding: To make matters even more strange, the paper posits that octopuses could have arrived on Earth in "an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs." And these eggs might have "arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago." The authors admit, though, that "such an extraterrestrial origin...of course, runs counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm." Indeed, few in the scientific community would agree that octopuses come from outer space. But the paper is not just about the provenance of cephalopods. Its proposal that octopuses could be extraterrestrials is just a small part of a much more extensive discussion of a theory called "panspermia," which has its roots in the ideas of ancient Greece. Newsweek spoke with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, who told the publication that the paper has raised "an interesting but controversial possibility." However, he added, that it offers no "indisputable proof" that the Cambrian explosion is the result of panspermia.
Further reading: Cosmos magazine has outlined some flaws in the assumptions that the authors made in the paper. It has also looked into the background of some of the authors. The magazine also points out that though the paper has made bold claims, it has yet to find support or corroboration from the scientific community. News outlet Live Science has also questioned the findings.
No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Seconded. Chandra Wickramasinghe is a one-trick pony whose answer to absolutely everything is panspermia. (life from space)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, wait, that was Pramodya Wickramasinghe.
Sorry.
Re: No. (Score:5, Funny)
No, the ones that are trained to speak are far too preoccupied filming their tentacle porn scens and really don't want to talk when they're off the clock. Because there's something about work in the industry that can never fill the need to be back home in the ocean crushing tactical subs and sucking out all their sweet, sweet fissile material.
Re: NO (Score:5, Insightful)
The real question is, "Did Slashdot's editors come from the Weekly World News ... ?"
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
Seconded. Chandra Wickramasinghe is a one-trick pony whose answer to absolutely everything is panspermia. (life from space)
You're not kidding. Not that I doubt panspermia is technically possible, but cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized octopus eggs? ... I'm trying to picture octopuses gently laying eggs deep inside a bunch of rocks, getting fertilized, frozen, getting hit with an asteroid but not getting destroyed during impact, impacted with such force it throws these rocks up into space, surviving a million/billion-year journey with no degradation in their structure or DNA, surviving yet another asteroid impact this time hitting Earth, and landing on a planet with the same life conditions as their home planet? I'm sorry but I'm finding Noah's ark to be far less challenging to believe than this story.
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Off the cuff, here is a possibility:
You assume it was an accident that the eggs were cryopreserved, etc. What if it was a deliberate act to preserve or perpetuate a species but:
a) The "matrix" degraded over the journey resulting in a mutant reconstitution
b) The "matrix" was purposefully crippled in order to give already present life a chance to adapt to it before it was allowed to evolve
c) The "matrix" was meant to integrate into currently available "matrices"
I am obviously not a biologist or any kind of ex
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It would have to land in water and break open such that the eggs didn't get destroyed. Melting inside the rock does no good.
A long wearing away process that stopped right as the eggs melted without destroying them might work, but is also a long shot. Shouldn't these be everywhere?
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Wickwrackrum has been thoroughly debunked here on /. before - this is just his latest manifestation of his idee fixe. As headlines go, this is of "Elvis abducted my space baby" quality.
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Take it as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When a topic is being addressed from higher level needs, such as a need for intellectual satisfaction, then people (including scientists) can practice intellectual honesty and a genuine search for truth, which is just as science is popularised as being, in a pure sense.
But if the issue is affecting needs lower down the stack, such as basic survival, ie. say the wrong thing and you will be ostracised, simply because various political interests, NGOs, companies, chariti
Re:Fascinating! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well said. And anyone who takes issue with it has only to look at almost 60 years worth of papers that "proved" that fat in our diets was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, a "fact" that just happened to make major industries in the US that are huge political donors lots of money. Or any number of other scientific claims that were sufficiently entrenched that it took at least years, maybe decades, for science to self-correct, even without a trillion dollars a year or so at stake.
It's not that AGW is "false" -- there is good support for some warming of the surface from increased CO2, in straight up physics, around 1 C per doubling of CO2, all things being equal. The trouble is that they aren't equal. The Earth's climate is a chaotic process, and it is pretty reasonable to doubt the predictive models attempting to integrate the Navier-Stokes double-coupled system on a spinning, tilted oblate spheroid covered irregularly with continents and oceans and mountains and warmed in a complex way in its evolving elliptical orbit by a somewhat variable star as far as "predictions" of things like water vapor feedback and changes in the global conveyor belt carrying oceanic heat around and atmospheric flow patterns, especially when the models are started with "arbitrary" initial conditions (since nobody has any idea what the actual state of the atmosphere and ocean is at anything like the granularity of the models, which is still 30 orders of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov scale), run to produce a spectrum of possible futures, averaged and then superaveraged without regard to weighting, and then turned into a "prediction" that is supposed to carry more political weight then the lives and fortunes of all of those affected by the enormously expensive measures taken to ameliorate a future "catastrophe" that nobody can actually quite measure as being truly catastrophic.
There are also inconvenient facts that are quietly ignored during the public debate by supporters of AGW as a "catastrophe". One is that roughly 1/7th of the Earth's population is eating today thanks to the roughly 15% increase in growth rate of C3 respiring plants due to the increase in CO2 in Earth's CO2-starved atmosphere (the minimum CO2 during the coldest part of the Wisconsin glaciation dropped to just over the partial pressure required to prevent mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants). That the Earth was coming out of the little Ice Age about the time we started really burning things for energy and gradually ramping up CO2, and that while too hot isn't great, too cold is TRULY a disaster for the breadbasket temperate zone for the planet, and isn't particularly good for the ecology, either, and is often accompanied by massive global droughts.
The point is that the climate is changing, and has always been changing. The notion that the Earth's climate is in any sense whatsoever a stationary process is a myth, a myth caused by the comparatively short "memory" of living humans compared to the timescales of change. The Earth is large enough that there are always climate/weather extremes happening somewhere on the surface, and if you look for them and report them as "news", you cannot avoid conveying the impression of disastrous change. It requires careful statistical analysis to detect anything like real change, and even then the statistics provides no reliable means of attributing cause, not in a chaotic model that has huge natural fluctuations year to year, month to month, week to week. It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.
This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning
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Take it as Machiavelli's reverse engineering of Maslow's hierarchy, with the goal of rooting the political consciousness in the age of Instant Bullshit (formerly known as the information age.)
When you have the means to push a message over a wide enough sector of the news-space, and that message intersects plausibly with survival instincts, you have your "Step 2," where "Step 3: Profit" is the ultimate conclusion.
No one in the US ever went broke selling fear to the American people, especially when you give
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No. Next question!
And if they seem alien with some separate evolutions they could be "aliens" from the deep sea, that evolved dowb there and then evolved back to being able to live higher in the ocean.
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I agree, no. You would have to say that Cuddle fish came from space too, along with other Octopus-like creatures. Not to mention that Cuddle fish are more intelligent than the Octopus, I mean, what would that say about alien life-forms? =p
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Cuttle.
'Cuddle fish' invokes this insane concept [peta.org]. And you don't want to go there.
Really, you don't.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's what they (the octopuses) want you to think.
Octopuses, Octopi (Score:2)
Will anybody speak for the Calamari?
Or even the Cuttlefish...
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I'd speak for the Mon Calamari, [wikia.com] but I suspect it's a trap.
I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
How does this get through peer review with 33 co-authors? I didn't even take a University level biology course and I can tell it's BS.
We can look at the DNA and RNA of Octupuses, we can tell we share common ancestors, if Octopuses came from another planet that would be really really obvious.
WTF? Do they think some Aliens abducted some cuttlefish, cloned them, and then dropped them back on the planet in Octopus form before heading on their way?
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I don't think they were trying to suggest that ONLY octopi came from another planet. When I saw an article a few weeks back, they were arguing that the explosion into multicellular life may have come from space.
Since there's no way to either prove or disprove it, it's not science, whether true or false, so it hardly matters.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The theory would be that all life on Earth derives somewhat from this extra-terrestrial seeding, and that octopuses are simply a manifestation of the sudden appearance of complex properties previously unobserved which were derived from the seeding. That at least has some plausibility, in that it cannot be easily falsified. Or at least I think that'd be the theory, the linked "paper" is rather long and I'm not going to waste my time reading it thoroughly (although I question any "paper" that has in one section a direct quotation from wikipedia on tardigrades...).
That said, pansperia is a load of crap: it explains nothing about the origin of life (even if life didn't originate on Earth, it had to originate somewhere, can't be turtles all the way down), has little or no scientific motivation (organic molecules are not life), and is (IMO) only really exists at all as a "theory" because it appeals to the sci-fi fan in many scientists.
Re: (Score:3)
The theory would be that all life on Earth derives somewhat from this extra-terrestrial seeding, and that octopuses are simply a manifestation of the sudden appearance of complex properties previously unobserved which were derived from the seeding. That at least has some plausibility, in that it cannot be easily falsified.
There's a wisdom to the phrase "use it or lose it". Traits that aren't actively selected for tend to get broken by genetic drift. It would be really hard to implant some Octopus genes in the initial seeding and just have them manifest in operational order in one tiny branch.
That said, pansperia is a load of crap: it explains nothing about the origin of life (even if life didn't originate on Earth, it had to originate somewhere, can't be turtles all the way down), has little or no scientific motivation (organic molecules are not life), and is (IMO) only really exists at all as a "theory" because it appeals to the sci-fi fan in many scientists.
I wouldn't entirely agree.
So right now we have a decent idea for how life could have started, primordial soup and all that. And it seems fairly plausible, but it's also a result of us saying "life began on Earth, this is the most plausib
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Why couldn't life have started on Venus and migrated here? Best guesses are that Venus was habitable for its first couple of billion of years of existence and it probably had oceans etc much like Earth.
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While not utterly provably impossible, the Venus hypothesis does not provide us with anything useful. It basically presumes that life could have developed on Earth and maybe conditions were good enough over on Venus earlier, and life hitchhiked over with that billion year head start. Well, if we already are presuming that life could have developed here, then why complicate things without an iota of actual evidence pointing towards the more convoluted path?
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Venus has an atmosphere nearly 100 times as dense as the earth, there probably never was phase when it could have supported life.
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From wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So right now we have a decent idea for how life could have started, primordial soup and all that. And it seems fairly plausible, but it's also a result of us saying "life began on Earth, this is the most plausible life-forming process that could work on Earth, therefore this is how life started."
But that's not necessarily the case, there might be other places in the Universe where for some reason it was much easier to life to form, if so panspermia becomes more likely.
It is quite plausible that Earth is a near optimal location for creating life. Protolife is probably just slime that clings to surfaces and has chemistry that encourages the formation of more and similar slimes, in the particular conditions where there is organic chemistry floating about. Porous rock with warm water, rich with various compounds, nearish volcanic sources that push water and dissolve minerals, what more do you need?
It is very plausible that there is vastly more bacteria seeping through the
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"That said, pansperia is a load of crap: it explains nothing about the origin of life (even if life didn't originate on Earth, it had to originate somewhere, can't be turtles all the way down)"
They *think* they're ready for that argument :
"Wickramasinghe, Hoyle and Steele have all entertained the notion that there is no need for such a creation story. When asked if there must be abiogenesis at some point, somewhere in the universe, Steele replies, “Actually no. If the universe is steady state infinite
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
PZ Myers says... (Score:3)
utter scientific illiteracy (Score:5, Interesting)
That's utterly ridiculous, as even basic high school science can tell you: there are numerous genes that are common to all animals, including octopuses; many of those evolved on earth long before octopuses. Even the eukaryotic cell itself is an idiosyncratic assembly of bacterial components, membranes, and genomes, something that is shared between octopuses and all other higher animals, and that would simply not have arisen the same way elsewhere.
The only way this could work is if life in the galaxy were in constant exchange everywhere so that life on all life bearing planets in the galaxy shares the same evolutionary history and that history is synchronized.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Very much so. Now think about what that says about the quality of peer reviewing and published science (original paper) and reporting in online magazines (like Quartz).
Re: (Score:2)
something that is shared between octopuses and all other higher animals, and that would simply not have arisen the same way elsewhere.
Why?
Ribosomes? Mitochondria? (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the specifics of their Ribosomes and the genetic structure of their mitochondria. If those are near standard, then the answer has to be no. If they're wildly at variance with everyone else, I'll consider the possibility.
Even then, it would take considerable proof, because the encoding of amino acids by RNA looks as if it should be arbitrary. (This is actually a sub-comment under "specifics of their Ribosomes", but it's significant enough that I thought it rated a separate mention.)
Re: (Score:3)
Octopus, cuttlefish, squid, and nautilus are all related as cephalopods. They are in the same phylum as snails and slugs on land, and things like nudibranchs underwater,
Their ancestors are things like ammonites, and it really shouldn't take a genius to spot how ammonites and nautilus could be related, and whilst I accept convergent evolution can trick the eye when trying to judge descendants, it's not merely convergent evolution in this case.
So we basically have a fossil record going right back to the begin
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Well, I played with a few octopuses they behaved a bit like dogs, they were curious and and came to me and put their arms around my hand. (Mediterranean sea, Greece)
Re:Ribosomes? Mitochondria? (Score:4, Interesting)
All too often though, like dogs, it's a taught behaviour by local dive guides, and divers. You see a similar thing with sharks- normally they want nothing to do with you and the most you'll see is the silhouette of one at the edge of visibility in the water. When you see video of sharks interacting with divers and brushing against them it's typically because of them having been baited and trained to associate divers with chum.
For what it's worth, I've even seen French angelfish trained to interact with people. A lady called Dee Scarr in Bonaire had a pair she'd trained which would approach her specifically when she entered the water and swam to the area they would hang around, but much as with the sharks and chum she did this by feeding them. People have done similar things with moray eels and the like, and lost their fingers as a result, such as the guy who had his thumb bitten off because a large moray mistook it for the sausage the guy would always feed it.
Ocean animals that will interact of their own free will with no training often include mammals - seals, sea lions, dolphins. You can witness this because even newly born seals who would not have seen people before will approach and play with humans. In fact, it's the older bulls that are basically horse sized (minus the legs) and could snap a human in two that prefer to keep their distance.
Then as I say there's the squid and cuttlefish, the reason I see these as being more interesting than my experience with octopodes so far is that the behaviours I see - the following and observation of people from a distance, would seem like a hard thing to train, but not only that, but I've witnessed many times across the globe. As such it would seem unlikely this curiosity they show would have been trained into so many different specimens across the globe - in contrast given the tourist draw of octopus interactions, and the relative ease of training that I believe it's more often likely to be a taught trait. This doesn't mean I think the naturally curious octopus is a myth, I think they're more than capable of it, but I think it's a relatively rare thing, at least far more so than the often sold idea that octopus will always just come right upto you and play with you - that's fundamentally not true (and probably a good thing, we don't need people dying to blue ringed octopus because it got frisky and bit them when they were playing with it).
The other interesting thing about squid and cuttlefish is that they'll try and communicate with you by flashing various colours at you when they approach you, or also if you move your fingers about, such as mimicking their attack pose by lifting your middle 3 fingers and lowering your thumb and little finger. They see this as their attack pose and will match it quite often. It's still very basic, but it's much more non-trivial communication than you get with many other species.
But, why though? (Score:3)
Intelligent alien 2: "Dude, why?"
Intelligent alien 1: "Cause it's a fun prank! C'mon, don't be a buzzkill."
Sure they did... (Score:2)
The Galiio Comparioson (Score:5, Insightful)
In the linked Cosmos article there is this quote from one of the authors:
The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time – most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo". Referring to the Galileo affair is among science crackpoterry something like Godwin's law in Internet discussions
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, and the crackpot list is long. Just look at Louis De Broglie, the prince of quantum. His thesis was first laughed at and dismissed by the greats like Bohr. It was't until it was handed to Einstein and he read it, realizing it was brilliant, that it ever was accepted. De Broglie had to fight hard against the accepted orthodoxy in the accepted model, but it turns out, he moved the ball forward.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/p... [encyclopedia.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I like to say that "everybody who's wrong thinks he's Galileo".
Here's Carl Sagan's take on this phenomenon (from "Broca's Brain"):
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
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...and they were right about Columbus.
I'm not saying it's aliens (Score:3)
...
but it's aliens
-The Authors
For the emperor (Score:2)
I Read the Paper And Looked Up Some Key References (Score:5, Insightful)
From the linked LiveScience commentary:
Other researchers were not quick to embrace this theory. "There's no question, early biology is fascinating — but I think this, if anything, is counterproductive," Ken Stedman, a virologist and professor of biology at Portland State University, told Live Science. "Many of the claims in this paper are beyond speculative, and not even really looking at the literature."
For example, Stedman said, the octopus genome was mapped in 2015. While it indeed contained many surprises, one relevant finding was that octopus nervous system genes split from the squid's only around 135 million years ago — long after the Cambrian explosion.
Well, this is looks to be a problem for this hypothesis.
So I decided to look into this a bit more so I downloaded the paper (which was in "accepted manuscript form" not as published paper) and look up some of its references. A key one is cited in the paper as (Liscovitch-Brauer et al 2017), for which the actual citation reference does not exist in the manuscript. I did find the paper though: Cell. 2017 Apr 6;169(2):191-202.e11. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.03.025, "Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods"
It includes this helpful paragraph (without the Wickramasinghe mumbo-jumbo inserted in the discussion):
Cephalopods are diverse and can be divided into the behaviorally complex coleoids, consisting of squid, cuttlefish, and octopus, and the more primitive nautiloids. In this paper we show that in neural transcriptomes extensive A-to-I RNA editing is observed in the behaviorally complex coleoid cephalopods but not in nautilus. The edited transcripts are translated into protein isoforms with modified functional properties. By comparing editing across coleoid taxa, we found that, unlike the case for mammals, many sites are highly conserved across the lineage and undergo positive selection, resulting in a sizable slow-down of coleoid genome evolution.
So the cephalopods are quite unusual, with a different approach to evolution starting with the cuttlefish (long before the octopus) with RNA editing taking precedence over DNA modification for evolution. This is very interesting.
The Liscovitch-Brauer paper also helpfully explains:
Cephalopods emerged in the late Cambrian period, roughly at 530 million years ago (mya), and the divergence of nautiloids from coleoides is estimated to have occurred at 350–480 mya. The coleoides diverged to Vampyropoda (octopus lineage) and the Decabrachia (squid and cuttlefish lineage) at 200–350 mya. Divergence of squid from Sepiida is estimated to have occurred at 120–220 mya.
So, a different approach to adapting to evolutionary pressure developed in the coleoides 350–480 mya (i.e. after splitting off from the nautoloids), which is 50-100 million years after the end of the Cambrian, and 60-110 million years after the Cambrian explosion (541 mya), and was in existence by the time that squid and octopus line separated (200-350 mya after the Cambrian explosion).
This is an enormous span of time, and no reason to suppose that alien genes imported at the Cambrian explosion started showing up in coleoides well over 100 million years later. Where were they hiding all that time?
The Wickramasinghe paper cites this anomalous biology of cephaloides, and then jumps to the conclusion "therefore aliens (maybe)".
They got their paper published, but I don't buy it.
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Too bad I can't edit to add an addendum.
What Wickramasinghe et al has done with the octopus is a slightly more sophisticated version of a game that creationists play.
All this stuff about "camera-like eyes", advanced nervous systems, color-changing etc. being so, so different from the nautilus that it is probably "aliens", is similar to the incredulity creationists express to show that evolution is impossible. The key difference (and the one they emphasize heavily) is the evolution by RNA editing that cephal
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look, I'm not an expert but . . . (Score:3)
I have actually *seen* an octopus (well a picture of one). Hey, it's pretty obvious they are alien. Anyone in *your* family look like that? Them little buggers are just waitin' for the Trump wars to wipe us out and they will take over the earth.
Oh, you have doubts? Well no less an authority than the Simpsons people will straighten you out. Check out Kang and Kodos on Wikipaedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (have you had your rectal probe today?)
So long (Score:2)
And thanks for all the prawns!
Richard Dawkins says otherwise (Score:2)
I mostly watch his atheist videos but he talks about Creationists obsession with the eye and how octopus evolved in an easy to understand video geared for children. [youtube.com]
He is an excellent teacher but he talks about ancestors to modern octopuses by the eye differences.
National Enquirer (Score:2)
I think I saw this in the National Enquirer last time I was in a grocery store, so it must be true!
Have you noticed that... (Score:2)
What about plants? (Score:3)
HP Lovecraft eat your heart out (Score:2)
Now taking bets on how many cthulu references will be made on this article.
The Correct Plural of Octopus, ask the editor (Score:2)
Octopi are not extraterrestrial... (Score:2)
Critical Thinking Skills (Score:2)
How to delete a /. post? (Score:2)
How to delete a /. post, anyone?
How the fuck did this end up being posted. I've never heard of such nonsense. Even the fact that we can measure genetic divergence should be a good indication that octopi are clearly terrestrial in origin.
DELETE THIS CRAP
Nope, you got it wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Octopi" would be Latin. But "Octopus" is a Greek word!
"Octopodes" would be a Greek plural for the word....
But we don't use that because we are speaking ENGLISH, in which the correct plural is "Octopuses."
Don't believe me? Google it. Proof comes right up at the top of the results.
Re:Nope, you got it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
But in Latin, Octopuses ends in an "i"!
-- Sean Connery
Re:Nope, you got it wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
But in Latin, Octopuses ends in an "i"!
And it is apparently from (scientific) Latin that the word enters the English language. Here's the OED's take:
Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin octopus. ...
...
Etymology: < scientific Latin octopus (1758 or earlier in Linnaeus) < ancient Greek
The plural form octopodes reflects the Greek plural; compare octopod n. The more frequent plural form octopi arises from apprehension of the final -us of the word as the grammatical ending of Latin second declension nouns; this apprehension is also reflected in compounds in octop- : see e.g. octopean adj., octopic adj., octopine adj., etc.
Alien Language (Score:3)
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For that matter, you can't change just any old Latin singular to plural by changing -us to -i.
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There are two singular forms that end in -us, one maskulin, nominative O-Declination, that has as plural -i, famous word: dominus.
The other one is U-declination, then the plural is -us like the singular, famous word: virus
So yes. for most latin words you _can_ substitute us for i and have the plural, but not for _all_.
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People insisting that you should use the Latin plural form are either trolls or tools.
Or alternatively they are somewhat aware of historic precedent established in scientific circles a few hundred years ago.
That you don't care about history doesn't make everyone else a troll. You're absolutely in your right to criticize the current standard as archaic, but it is unreasonable for you to assume that people are following standards just to get a rise out of you.
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octopuses doesn't rhyme.
Octopodes do no lyin' deeds.
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Re:Nope, you got it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY
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EVERY LANGUAGE ON EARTH is nothing more than a conglomeration and bastardizations of words from all the other languages around.
Not really. Some languages are very resistant to foreign terms. Chinese is like that, because their ideogram system represents ideas rather than pronunciation. Japanese solved this problem by using an additional alphabet (katakana) just for "loanwords", and foreign terms are very common in Japanese. Among European languages, Icelandic is very resistant to foreign terms.
English is one of the most promiscuous languages. It is very easy to just insert a foreign term into an English sentence, and with a fe
Re:Nope, you got it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
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This is demonstrably false to anyone with a passing familiarity with linguistics and languages.
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They may not lie, but they're notorious for giving wet willies.
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that would be the possessive Octopus's Garden not Octopuses
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octopi don't lie.
A cube of cheese no larger than a die
The bait to catch a wandering mie
But the mountain likely will erode
Before I catch an octopode
Burma Shave
8 core Rasberry Pi. (Score:2)
The OctoPi. It's out of this world.
Re:yes. (Score:4, Funny)
For myself, I think octopuses are a dead giveaway that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been punking us.
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It was published in error. It was published 13 March 2018 but it was supposed to be published on 1 April 2018.
. . . I think the authors are hoping to win an IgNobel with this . . .
Re: Betteridged (Score:2, Funny)
You should read my enlightening article titled "Can any headline that ends in a question mark be answered by the word no?"
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I think the question you were looking for is "Must every question in a headline that can be answered with 'no' be answered with 'no'?"
O R'lyeh? (Score:3)
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As much as I fantasise about panspermia
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
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Re:Anything not accepted by the echo chamber is cr (Score:4, Interesting)
> It never hurts to re-explore and think different.
I's a waste of time and resources to think differently for an extended period when the "thinking differently" produces no insights. I've examined the TED Talk you referred to. I'm afraid that it's horrible. I'm afraid that there was not even a single 6 minute period, anywhere in his talk, in which he did not commit the "straw man" logical fallacy.
I agree that re-examining assumptions, and revisiting underlying assumptions, can be invaluable. There are too many situations where the opacity of a layer of abstraction have concealed a critical factor in my career and in my own fields of expertise. But just because an idea violates a long-held belief is not a reason to _support_ it, unless it provides testable or verifiable predictions, predictions that are superior to those of the existing approach.
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No one has any problem with outside theories, as long as they're backed by evidence.
But when you bullshit, fudge, ignore scientific evidence that's inconvenient to your agenda and so on, and so forth, then yes, expect to get shot down.
The very fact we have technological progress at the fastest rate in human history is evidence that outside theories are accepted and acknowledged, but only when they have a plausible backing behind them.
Sheldrake wasn't banned, in fact, his video is on the TED site, it was jus
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... since when did papers becomes the new platform for fake news and pure speculation.
Since they figured out that's what sell them papers these days.
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About the same time we started using the news media to intentionally propagate comforting lies so the weak-minded among us could all tune into the same stations and create a fake consensus reality.
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If you think mathematics is science, you are an ignorant pilebof shit.
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From the OED:
he Oxford English Dictionary lists octopuses, octopi and octopodes (in that order);
it labels octopodes "rare", and notes that octopi derives from the mistaken assumption that octps is a second declension Latin noun, which it is not. Rather, it is
(Latinized) Ancient Greek, from oktpous (), gender masculine, whose plural is oktpodes ().
If the word were native to Latin, it would be octps ('eight-foot
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Do you have a diagram to support your statement?