Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/15/scientists-declare-octopi-as-l.html
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Doesn’t rice have more genes than humans?
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I’m picturing Zoidberg as Charleton Heston, caught up in a fish net after global warming thawed out his deep sea cryo chamber.
Or aliens. Whatever.
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Octopus people built the pyramids!!
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Lots of things have more DNA than humans; it’s called the c-value paradox. There’s a Japanese plant whose genome is 50 times larger than that of humans.
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Wasn’t this whole “Octopi are aliens!” thing debunked several months ago as a few clueless reporters misunderstanding and distorting some mild hyperbole they fixated on in a paper they didn’t read all the way through?
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Which is just one of the reasons why I question the number of genes being an indicator of extraterrestrial origin.
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Come on BB.
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Yeah, I remember this paper from 2016 which might be the misquoted paper you’re talking about. If anybody hasn’t gone to the external source link in the OP, don’t bother-- it’s clickbait garbage.
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“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.
Not easily found, as if to say that “transformative genes” have been found in other (although few) pre-existing life forms? If so, what could that suggest? I haven’t heard anything about extra-terrestrial dinosaur eggs.
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So why not time travel?
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If you look up the paper (which they did not include a link to) it’s 30 scientists saying “we have a lot of evidence that both supports and refutes all of our theories, but we like this one better than all the others.”
This is a case of science not knowing how to say “we don’t have a good explanation.”
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Oy, if there’s a life form on Earth that I could believe is alien it’s not octopi. It’s water bears.
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“I have no idea how this sock ended up on my roof! Maybe it fell from outer space.”
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Possibly. They seem to be able to stand up to any environment.
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Obviously, they’re proof of intelligent design.
Of His Noodly Appendages.
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I think the article says more about the scientists involved and the two publications. Perhaps Infowars vetted the paper.
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Not every day you get to chew on “parsimonious cosmic explanation.”
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