By Kevin E. Noonan — Cephalopods are fascinating creatures, and their primary living representative — the octopus — has recently been the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher.” They are clearly intelligent (as set forth in Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness), but it is an intelligence so different from human intelligence that it was an inspiration for the alien first-contact film, Arrival. Outside the coleoid group, the only living relative are animals of the genus Nautilus, the sole surviving externally shelled cephalopod since the Paleozoic (541 to…
