Читать книгу Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life - Peter Godfrey-Smith, Питер Годфри-Смит - Страница 5

The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.

– William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890

The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages … At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea – at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.

– Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916