Looking at all of Earth’s species if you had to guess which one had an alien origin, the octopus might make the short list, and now some scientists are actually making that case.
Wikipedia A controversial paper recently appeared in the science journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology and it argues that octopuses are such complex beings that they can only be explained from an extraterrestrial perspective. Though the journal lists 33 researchers as collaborating on the paper, it’s being criticized for having zero zoologists. Prominent among the researchers is Chandra Wickramasinghe who is a leading proponent of the theory or directed panspermia, which states that life on Earth was seeded by alien microbes.
Flickr To say that the paper has garnered criticism from the scientific community would be an understatement. Mark Carnall, the Life Collections Manager at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, took to Twitter with some hot opinions of his own about the paper: Octopuses from Space? Great example of a paper trying to be too dumb in the hope it loops back around to profound. SPOILERS It doesn’t loop round to profound. Just dumb.
The Pseudoscience of Octopuses in Space. A recent kerazy paper has been picking up some media traction. I have a look at the nonsense claims about “Octopuses and/or Squid” from the Cosmos. #Cephalopod #AlienOctopus
The chief aim of the papers seems to be an attempt to explain the Cambrian explosion, an event that took place around 500 million years ago when complex animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record. From IFLScience: Anyway, back to the aliens. In their paper the team say that the arrival of alien microbes probably kickstarted the Cambrian explosion, with the diversification ending with the evolution of the octopus. Makes sense.
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Wikimedia Commons “The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity,” they note, adding that features like its large brain and camera-like eyes “appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.” Why? Because, aliens, of course. Have you even been reading this article? “The evolution from squid to octopus is compatible with a suite of genes inserted by extraterrestrial viruses,” the researchers write. But wait, there’s more. Because maybe it wasn’t just microbes, right? Yes, there’s another explanation, namely that the octopus eggs were cryopreserved by a comet and delivered to our planet. Maybe squid too.
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NOAA “The possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted,” the paper notes. The paper continues. At one point they argue that we are on the doorstep of “one of the biggest back-flips in history” regarding how life emerged on our planet, comparing it to the idea of continental drift once being discounted. Carnall had more to say on the issue and a few other scientists chimed in as well:
Mark Carnall - Youtube I’ve only looked through the #cephalopod bits in detail. It is a nonsense, not standing up to the most basic understanding of cephalopod biology & evolution. There are some fancy words and some recent real references but the whole thing should be quickly flushed out the siphon.
Jonathan Eisen, a professor at UC-Davis also piled on. The paper is, well, not good (shocking - I know) but it does have on of the best figures I have seen describing the origins of octopi from space viruses
In spite of this, the paper got a write up in Cosmos Magazine in an article that almost validates the theory. What do you think about all of this? With so much unknown about the Universe we live on and the suddenness of the Cambrian explosion of complex animals, is any theory really that far fetched?