Book Look: The Soul of an Octopus, by Sy Montgomery

This informative narrative of a naturalist's "dive" into the world of octopuses - their physiology, behaviour, and intelligence - was a diverting read. As a life science teacher, I was coming to this with a fair amount of background knowledge, so didn't necessarily acquire any new insights or understandings. But the book works as a well-rounded summary of what we knew about the genus at the time it was written (2016 - I mention this because so much new info has emerged since then), and Montgomery knows how to tell a good story, weaving references to extant research with personal anecdotes (her interactions with various octopuses, her quixotic attempts to master the art of scuba diving) and the larger goings-on at the New England Aquarium, a complex establishment supported by a passionate supporting cast of scientists, naturalists, and volunteers.

I appreciated the balance the author (mostly) maintains between drawing attention to the apparent human-like behaviours and intelligence of octopuses while simultaneously acknowledging the limits of judging their intelligence using the same measures that we apply to mammals. As she rightly notes, mammals and cephalopods represent entirely different branches of the tree of life, having diverged so long ago that almost everything that we would appear to have in common - eyes, brains, endocrine systems - emerged via separate, potentially dissimilar processes. Measuring octopus intelligence using the same scales we employ for mammals (tool use, empathy) would be like trying to understand seashells using the same criteria (hardness, luster, fracture patterns) we've developed to characterize rocks.

As this book emphasizes, we are only just beginning to realize how ill-equipped we are to understand non-human intelligence. Montgomery's most useful contribution here, I believe, is making the case that we need to set aside preconceived biases and start considering the reality that evolution has not been a single, unidirectional march from primitive --> human, but a series of parallel processes, leading off in any number of as yet unsuspected and unimagined directions.