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Monday, July 16, 2018

Amazing Cephalopods

We've posted this wonderful video on Viewpoint in the past, but I thought newer readers might like to see it because it raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary for cephalopods to camouflage themselves like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these animals display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA and DNA programs for proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through purely mechanistic processes?

Anyway, keep in mind as you watch the video that, on naturalism, these creatures evolved these marvelous capabilities purely by undirected random mutations in their genome.

If you don't keep that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.