William Collins

Metazoa

Peter Godfrey-Smith

If Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds was the octopus, this is everybody else. He works up the animal tree looking for where experience begins — sponges with no neurons at all, then corals, then a shrimp that stuns prey with a snap,…

Other Minds

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Our last common ancestor with an octopus was a flattened worm about six hundred million years back, which makes them the closest thing to meeting an intelligent alien on this planet. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and a scuba diver, and…