Huss, John

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ious to know more about bird cognitive neurobiol-ogy, and how that ﬁeld might advance.Having said that, my overall assessment remainsvery positive. I found I learned a great deal fromreading this volume: about cognition in general andbirds in particular. The individual chapters are allstrong and the book is so well assembled that it wasan enjoyable study.Andrew B. Barron, Biological Sciences, MacquarieUniversity, North Ryde, New South Wales, AustraliaOther Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and theDeep Origins of Consciousness.By Peter Godfrey-Smith. New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux. $27.00. x + 255 p. + 8 pl.; ill.; index. ISBN:978-0-374-22776-0 (hc); 978-0-374-71280-8 (eb).The geographic center of this book on the origins ofconsciousness is a surreal diving locale off the coastof Sydney: Octopolis. Here Godfrey-Smith, a philos-opher of biology and avid scuba diver, communeswith octopuses, who—uncharacteristically for an or-dinarily solitary creature—have a variety of interac-tions with one another and with their neoprene-cladhuman observers. The behaviors experienced, ob-served, and recorded—battles, curious touches, andpsychedelic displays—give rise to questions abouttheir origin, physiological basis, and function thatthe author answers by drawing upon the relevant bi-ological, philosophical, and psychological research.He also documents these striking displays and behav-iors in a series of color and black-and-white photo-graphs. The volume is pervaded by a sense of theauthor’s out-and-out wonder at these creatures, andthe photographs and prose work together to helpreaders realize andappreciate their profound strange-ness. Spoiler alert: did you know that there are spe-cies of octopus who see with their skin?Following in the footsteps of the pragmatist philos-opher and psychologist William James, Godfrey-Smith starts from the assumption that the key totackling the origins (note the plural) and nature ofconsciousness is to examine it as something that hasevolved—and multiple times at that. This motivateshis investigation of independent origins, precursors,and partial or unclear cases of consciousness drawnfrom across the tree of life. What is at stake hereare not only the origins of consciousness, but ofmulticellularity, animality, sentience, and cognition.Communication theory is put to good explanatoryuse. Intercellular communication began in the sea,but was internalized when multicellularity evolved.To make the point that communication dependson features of both the sender and the receiver,the seemingly limitless (visual) expressive ability ofoctopuses and cuttleﬁsh is meaningfully contrastedwith the more limited (vocal) repertoire of the ba-boon, who nonetheless has a sophisticated ability tointerpret and respond to sequences of calls.For biologists, this book will serve as a point ofentry into what has traditionally been thought ofas a philosophical problem—the origin and natureof consciousness. The strategy is a Darwinian one:partly speculative and partly empirical. The precur-sors to the possibility of subjective experience—howit feels to be an organism of a given kind—are shownto be present in such rudimentary aspects of percep-tual psychology as the ability to separate out the ef-fects of the perceiver’s own position and movementfrom the visual properties of the object of perception.Keeping track of one’s own states is thus part andparcel of tracking the external world, providing rawmaterial for the evolution of subjective experience.For philosophers, this work will serve as yet anotherexample of philosophical naturalism in action, themethodological perspective that helps itself to whatsciencehas to say, but uses that only as a set of startingassumptions for a deep dive into the philosophicalquestion at issue. Godfrey-Smith draws broadly uponthe scientiﬁc literature, neatly tucked away and dweltupon in extensive endnotes, clearing the way for hislucid prose to penetrate the murk surrounding con-sciousness.John E. Huss, Philosophy, University of Akron, Akron,OhioANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGYDiving Physiology of Marine Mammals andSeabirds.By Paul J. Ponganis. Cambridge and New York: Cam-bridge University Press. $140.00. xv + 333 p.; ill.; in-dex. ISBN: 978-0-521-76555-8. 2015.It was a pleasure to read this extensive book on thediving physiology of marine mammals and birds. Itis the most in-depth review of diving physiology thatI have seen in many years in that it covers both thelong history of diving studies, and the most recentadvances in this ﬁeld. Unlike other contemporarybooks about marine mammals, Ponganis targets theexplicit ﬁeld of diving physiology and all of the chap-ters relate to that phenomenon. For example, the sec-tion on thermal physiology looks at temperatureregulation as it relates to diving ability and the sectionon hydrodynamics and drag focus how those factorsplay into reducing diving metabolism. There havebeen entire reviews written about each of the 13 sub-NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKSJune 2018 159

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