“Yes. So, here it is: We’ve been scraping the oceans of protein for centuries now, overfishing, tearing apart food webs, creating a sort of undersea ice age—driving some species to extinction, driving others to search for new niches, new methods of survival. Massive environmental pressures on every species in the sea. So—let’s say you had an octopus from one of the deeper layers of the sea—a long-lived species, with benthic young. A species used to a simple way of gathering food in a stable environment. But over many generations, you kept decreasing its food supply—kept pushing it out to the fringes of its habitat, forcing it to exercise its creative faculties. To learn and adapt—and to feed that adaptation back into its evolutionary system. The octopus that survives is the one whose parent sticks around long enough to teach it after its birth, because that mutation would give it a huge advantage over competitors. You might see new RNA coding emerge that rewarded more longevity—a mating and death timing that enabled nurturing of the young, rewarded social skills. You might see other mutations that favored the more social, communicative animals. The ability to act as a coordinated group would be an enormous advantage: to specialize, to stake out and guard territory, to learn from one another. Think of human societies during the ice age: massive environmental pressures forced innovation, forcing them to master cooperative strategies to bring down big megafauna for sustenance, and in turn that added nutrition built better brains, allowed more specialization … in evolutionary terms, the emergence of the modern brain occurs with spectacular speed, as culture feeds back into the genetic system … and then language hits, and things really get emergent…”

Ha trailed off. She had been speaking quickly, trying to get it all out in one piece. These were the dreams at the edge of her work in cephalopod intelligence—the things she would never have told another scientist. The things beyond her science of the real world in front of her. Fantasies. Hunches. “But that’s the key: language. None of it means anything without that, so first you have to overcome the language problem. Humans could use other things besides speech for communications, if we had to. Body language, or sign language, or music, or whistling, or song, or expressions of the face, or drawing in the dirt with a stick—and we do, at times. But we suppress these in favor of speech. Why? Because verbal speech is efficient, nearly universal, teachable, and highly translatable. If our communication had remained a mix of mediums, we would have had a much harder time transcribing it into writing. We would also have had a harder time teaching and learning it.