This wonderful video raises some fascinating questions:
How did the physiology necessary to camouflage itself like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these cephalopods display evolve by those same mechanisms?
If mutations affect DNA, and DNA generates 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 mechanistic processes that didn't "know" what they were doing?
The evolution of any behavior requires not just the appropriate genetic mutations to create the neural algorithms that control the behavior but also the physiological structures necessary for the behavior. These changes, moreover, must occur gradually over eons of time and pretty much simultaneously in a population of organisms, and, according to the naturalistic account, as a result of purely blind, undirected mechanisms.
If you keep all 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.
