> Sooo... can we breed octopi for intelligence? How far could that rise in say a hundred years?
Who has time to wait 100 years? Intelligence is not really correlated with brain size, but I'd start by breeding octopodes and then selecting the octopus eggs that seem to be inhabited by octopus with larger-than-average brains. Their eggs are transparent and you can just look, while tossing the ones that you don't want to hatch. Next I would iterate on this for a few generations, meanwhile selecting for octopus problem solving and communication.
I think that might quickly fail. I know you've already seen the guppy paper where they did just that with mixed results, and that was only a handful of generations. Brain size is not that great a proxy for intelligence.
> Brain size is not that great a proxy for intelligence.
Oh certainly, agreed. But larger brains can be easier to work with, such as for slicing studies where you examine the different areas of the brain to look for evidence of changes that you might want to keep for the next generation. Smaller brains have less matter to work with, and therefore have less of a chance of developing novel features that strike your fancy while you attempt to select the ones that might have a higher probability of developing impressive cognitive ability. Having said this, I am very interested in trying to take something already rather clever (like a dog) and seeing how small we can get the brain before it loses all of its interesting behavior. For whatever reason society has already developed a fascination with really small dogs with small heads anyway.....
But the article points out that not all of their neural structure is in their discrete brain case. Part of the machinery that drives their intelligence seems to be in their limbs.
Who has time to wait 100 years? Intelligence is not really correlated with brain size, but I'd start by breeding octopodes and then selecting the octopus eggs that seem to be inhabited by octopus with larger-than-average brains. Their eggs are transparent and you can just look, while tossing the ones that you don't want to hatch. Next I would iterate on this for a few generations, meanwhile selecting for octopus problem solving and communication.