Sunday, July 29, 2012
Purely amazing!
The Squid lady has picked up a wonderful observation. It turns out that cuttlefish (related to squid and octopus) not only sleep, they dream. And the dreaming looks just like mammalian dreaming, with twitching arms and eyes.... EXCEPT! Cuttlefish can do one thing we can't. They can communicate by projecting patterns on their skin. And the patterns show up in dreams, just as mammals growl or bark or talk in our sleep.
The original article describes it thusly:
The video contained in the original article is all the convincing I need. The first minute is quiet sleep; the chromatophore pattern was set to match the gravel, so the cuttlefish is hard to see. When the dream starts, there's no doubt what's happening.
= = = = =
This provides another disproof (not that we need any more) of the random-evolution theory. Mollusks and vertebrates diverged a long time ago, and have very little in common. The randomists would tell us that REM sleep, which is dangerous to the individual, developed through a long chain of purely random mutations... and that it developed TWICE, identically, in types of animals that reached intelligence through entirely separate paths.
REM is dangerous? Sure. Sleeping quietly without moving is a good survival helper. You're not providing any motion cues to predators. But when you start wiggling and barking, or wiggling and color-patterning, your attempt at camouflage is all screwed up.
Come on, randomists. Time to give up.
The original article describes it thusly:
REM sleep has been convincingly documented in two vertebrate orders (birds and mammals). ... We find suggestive evidence of a putative analog of avian/mammalian REM sleep in Sepia officinalis. Like birds and mammals, this state is characterized by phasic activation of motor circuits (against a background of quiescence) that appeared endogenous in origin, rather than exogenously driven by external stimuli. This manifests most strikingly as phasic activation of the skin chromatophores, but also includes small movements (twitches) of the arms and eyes. Intriguingly, the chromatophore activation was not random, and is thus reminiscent of the non-random nature of REM sleep motor activity. In cats, for example, brainstem lesions that remove REM sleep atonia result in stereotyped motor activity (stalking, batting at objects) during REM sleep. ... It is therefore possible that the non-random chromatophore activation observed during quiescence might be similar to patterns of activation that can occur during vertebrate REM sleep.
The video contained in the original article is all the convincing I need. The first minute is quiet sleep; the chromatophore pattern was set to match the gravel, so the cuttlefish is hard to see. When the dream starts, there's no doubt what's happening.
= = = = =
This provides another disproof (not that we need any more) of the random-evolution theory. Mollusks and vertebrates diverged a long time ago, and have very little in common. The randomists would tell us that REM sleep, which is dangerous to the individual, developed through a long chain of purely random mutations... and that it developed TWICE, identically, in types of animals that reached intelligence through entirely separate paths.
REM is dangerous? Sure. Sleeping quietly without moving is a good survival helper. You're not providing any motion cues to predators. But when you start wiggling and barking, or wiggling and color-patterning, your attempt at camouflage is all screwed up.
Come on, randomists. Time to give up.
Labels: Grand Blueprint
¶ 2:34 AM
