Peter Godfrey-Smith is the scuba-diving philosopher who took octopus off the menu for many readers of his bestselling book, Other Minds. It looked at the distinctive intelligence of cephalopods, rescuing this myth-laden eight-limbed creature from its most frequent setting of a seafood salad and recasting it as subaquatic hero of perception and understanding.
Following up that literary success with 2020’s Metazoa (the word means multicellular animals), Godfrey-Smith is about to publish the final part of his trilogy on the roots of intelligence, Living on Earth: Life, Consciousness and the Making of the Natural World.
