Avoiding some unpleasant piece of business, one of those phone calls you’d rather not make, I started paying attention to the birds flitting around outside my office window. Just out there doing their thing, effortlessly darting through branches with their little bird brains. In rather stark contrast, overhead the big jets lumber into Boston Logan Airport on a straight flight path, no deviations. A path chosen, presumably, for its fuel-efficient obedience to Newtonian physics. Whereas those birds are like quantum quarks, or what I imagine quantum quarks to be. Flipping, twisting, ducking and bobbing and weaving, perfect motion with no error, no onboard computer, and brains the size of an almond.
We don’t typically credit birds with much in the way of intelligence. We tend to think the 747 is the marvel, not the sparrow. We even go so far as to disparage birds.
But this is our own lack of understanding, not the bird’s. Clearly that sparrow outside my window possesses a rather impressive form of intelligence, navigating that maze of branches and open sky at Mach speed. It is just that we cannot comprehend it and we, possessed of opposable thumbs and a hyper-enlarged frontal cortex, make of ourselves the measure and standard of intelligence. Even if we would be totally helpless in a bird’s world, the first fall from a tree branch would kill us.
“A very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?” – David Hume
Thus from our small sliver of understanding do we propose to order the world and even the universe, and decree decisively upon what is and what is not. The birds have a different opinion, but no one asks them.
No one asks the octopuses, either. Perhaps even more so than the birds, octopuses have a completely unintelligible intelligence. A decentralized brain, two-thirds of their neurons located in their tentacles. Not only do they see and feel with their thousands of individual suckers, they somehow think through them, too. Think that one through. Try to picture what that existence must be like. Navigating oceanic depths via tentacle-thought. Yeah, I can’t do it, either.
But very clearly our cephalopod friends possess intelligence. They’ve figured out how to escape from tanks, they can solve puzzles and demonstrate abstract thought, they protect their young, they’ve been surviving in oceanic depths for 300 million years. (They predate the dinosaurs by 50 million years.) That we don’t understand them does not make them less smart. Our evolutionary paths diverged some 600 million years ago, the octopus joining the ranks of the invertebrates and humans going on to become glamorous, bipedal apes who make jet planes and punch holes in the ozone layer. Leaving aside the question of who is more likely to still be around in another 300 million years, what happened was, nature came up with intelligent minds not once, but twice. Perhaps many more times than that.
The other day I spotted a bee crawling across the driveway. She looked tired, she was definitely going to get crushed if a car came along. So I gave her a lift. I made a little bee friend.
Bees, too — with brains one one-millionth as complex as a human’s — can recognize human faces. They’ve demonstrated a capacity to learn. You think imagining what it would be like to be a bird is hard — try to be a bee for five minutes. Zipping through a meadow in 4D with infrared and ultraviolet vision far, far from home, seeking the right kind of pollen, the only food source that will sustain you and your sisters back home. Good freaking luck.
Knowing what you don’t know is half the battle. This, of course, is why we do our best to make the universe explicable. Why we strive to draw the best possible property lines and the state seeks to make the land legible. You can’t let the birds run things, still less the octopuses or the bees. (Some might argue that the birdbrains nevertheless seem to be.)
Mysteries abound. Our efforts to eradicate them notwithstanding. The mystery of flight, the mystery of God’s grace. Did you know the universe is 93 billion light years wide and still expanding? Expanding into what?
And all of this, this whole rabbit hole, came about because I was seeking to avoid a bad bit of business. Discomfort comes with the territory in my line of work, sometimes you have to make hard phone calls. You can’t solve the mysteries. The word itself is a bit of a misnomer, it implies a solution. That, for instance, we’ve figured out the mystery of flight because I can log on to FlightAware, track a plane from Baltimore from Boston (really remarkable tech, all the way around, though). The birds outside my window say different. They ay we don’t even know how to fly.
How would an octopus make this phone call? A bee? Lucky ducks, they don’t have to.
I picked up the phone and made the call. When it was finished, the birds were still flying, the bees were still buzzing and the octopuses (I presume) were still swimming. Lucky ducks.
Court Merrigan is a father, writer and broker. He lives in Marblehead.
