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Comment by sulam | Hacker News Reader

Without trying to support the piece, the DNA question has a rich history of being explainable via the panspermia theory.

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Ok, then the point of the piece, that the Octopus is special in being 'alien', becomes moot? Everything is 'alien'.

But in this case, the leap in complexity is so obvious we can tell it's alien (they say.)

That argument sounds awfully similar to that of Intelligent Design.

I imagine that Punctuated Equilibrium is a far simpler explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

If you find a watch on a beach... was the old argument. The argument in the paper is that the Octopi change is so fast and so immense it leaves every known instance of PE, including human evolution, far behind along with every other known leap forward. I'm not endorsing that view, just retailing it.

I'm wondering if the fossil record supports the conclusion that octopuses actually got all the claimed features at once? How does a fossil (of a soft creature, notoriously rare to fossilize at all) indicate the presence of color change, large eye and so on.

Or is it a DNA argument. Then I'm back to why DNA at all unless everything is alien. In which case, why the article. Its like "there's this one alien guy in Idaho..." instead of "There's other intelligent life in the universe!!!"

Good point, re soft bodies fossilizing more rarely - because what may have happened is the squids just didn't show up in the fossil record for a very long time, nor the proto-squids. Ocean acidification at various periods (say due to CO2 variations at different periods, which were large) would be a factor.

I'm not saying the 33 scientists weren't well aware of these considerations, though.

I think JoeAltmaier (your parent commenter) still has a point.

If the leap in complexity of octopuses is so obvious that we can tell it's an alien, do you mean other earlier life in our planet was not alien? That would not make sense because it would be hard to imagine that two independent evolutions of life led to the same protein-based, DNA-based life. So the only reasonable theory is that both the earlier life in our planet as well as octopuses are aliens which is JoeAltmaier's point.

The 33 scientists do not mean that. I think, in fact, to make their argument go forward, you pretty much have to assume that squid arrived earlier from a different branch of the same alien lineage, but were quickly - so quickly - followed by vasty more complex octopi, that we know that octopi didn't evolve here. The authors aren't anti-panspermists.

JoeAltmaier's wasn't the one introducing the idea of panspermia. His point was, instead: "why even write this paper focusing on octopi if all life is alien" and my answer was, 'cause this is the one time you can really prove that (according to the authors.)

But it also then supports the much larger issue of Panspermia. That should have been the title/main point then? Yes this is quite a strange article.

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