Metazoa
by Peter Godfrey-Smith · first published 2020
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"Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom--the Metazoa--they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds. In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfre
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Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses this topic at length in his recent-ish book Metazoa and uses observations of insects and other invertebrates to argue, compellingly in my opinion, that sentience and cognitive abilities are not intrinsically linked, but rather depend on the specific organism's…
on “Do Insects Feel Pain?” ↗An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback…
on “Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?” ↗Peter Godfrey Smith covers some of this in his book Metazoa but he rejects pan-psychicism and tries to make us believe that pure materialism can explain consciousness, as it emerged in animals over the last 750 million years, going back to an unknown ur-brain…
on “Problems for Goff’s Panpsychism” ↗In his book Metazoa, Peter Godfrey-Smith mentions that life in the ocean was more diverse than life on land, until a 130 million years ago, when diversity on land became exceptional, mostly driven by a feedback loop between…
on “Sea life bounced back fast after the ‘mother of mass extinctions’” ↗