A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish have been put to a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appear to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Scientists showed that cuttlefish can refrain from eating a meal of crab meat in the morning once they have learnt dinner will be something they like much better - shrimp. This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such as future planning, and it was originally conducted to study how human cognition develops.
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The more relevant consideration is what is required such that we may collectively accept the possibility - even all probability - that we are surrounded by intelligence and awareness, albeit in forms alien to our limited, constructed frame of comprehension.
Our conceptual relationship to the vast diversity of life on our planet is eloquently summarized in the words of Henry Beston:
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
