Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

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Peter Godfrey-Smith. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CONTENTS

MEETINGS ACROSS THE TREE OF LIFE

A HISTORY OF ANIMALS

MISCHIEF AND CRAFT

FROM WHITE NOISE TO CONSCIOUSNESS

MAKING COLORS

OUR MINDS AND OTHERS

EXPERIENCE COMPRESSED

OCTOPOLIS

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Отрывок из книги

– William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

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~ The Garden

In 1946, an Australian geologist, Reginald Sprigg, was exploring some abandoned mines in the outback of South Australia. Sprigg had been sent to find out whether some of the mines might be worth working again. He was several hundred miles from the nearest sea, in a remote area called the Ediacara Hills. Sprigg was eating his lunch, the story has it, when he turned over a rock and noticed what looked like some delicate fossils of jellyfish. As a geologist, he knew the rocks were so old that the finding was important. But he was not an established researcher of fossils, and when he wrote up his paper, few people took it seriously. The journal Nature rejected it, and Sprigg then worked his way down from journal to journal, until his article on what he called “Early Cambrian (?) Jellyfishes” appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia in 1947, alongside such papers as “On the Weights of Some Australian Mammals.” The paper had a quiet career at first, and it took another decade or so before anyone realized what Sprigg had found.

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