Octopus, commonly known as "octopus", belongs to the cephalopod octopus family. At present, there are 252 known octopus species on the earth, which are widely distributed in tropical and temperate waters on the earth. Because octopus looks very strange, there are aliens based on octopus in many sci-fi works. Of course, this is just people's whimsy. But interestingly, octopus may not be a real "local fish" on the earth, because studies have shown that octopus should come from aliens.

Why do scientists suspect that octopus originated from creatures outside the earth? Let's first look at the "basic configuration" of octopus. Octopus is a standard mollusk. Except for its beak, there is no hard place in its whole body. They have three hearts (two of which supply blood to the gills and the other to the whole body), nine brains and as many as 500 million neurons.

What is the concept of 500 million neurons? Here's a contrast. Rats are familiar animals. Although we all hate them, we have to admit that mice are creatures with high IQ. However, mice have only 80 million neurons.

The nine brains of octopus are 1 "main brain" (located in the nerve center) and eight "secondary brains" (located in eight brachiopods), of which the "main brain" accounts for 40% of neurons, and the rest neurons are evenly distributed in the eight "secondary brains".

Every "secondary brain" of octopus has the ability to act autonomously and react quickly to the external environment. Many of their behaviors don't need the instructions of the "main brain". Scientists have observed that the octopus can still move for a short time (about one hour) after it is in wrist fracture, and it can also avoid obstacles.

It is precisely because of these peculiar "configurations" that octopus has extraordinary wisdom. Jim cosgrove, a French biologist, once pointed out that octopus even has the ability of abstract thinking, which enables them to show very complex behavior patterns. I believe everyone has read a lot about how smart octopus is, so I will skip it here.

The above can only show that octopus is a strange creature, but it cannot effectively prove that octopus is not an "indigenous fish" on the earth. In fact, due to the special mechanism of octopus evolution, scientists suspect that octopus originated from creatures outside the earth.

Explain this mechanism briefly first. We can think of DNA as a recipe and RNA as a chef. Usually, chef RNA will make a dish-protein's "dish" in strict accordance with the menu (which is the material basis of life activities), and during this period, he will hardly make his own decisions. This is called the central law of gene expression, and most organisms, including humans, follow this law.

However, octopus RNA is not like this. They often disdain the formula of DNA, but these chefs are not fooling around. They actually "improvise" according to the actual situation (this is RNA editing), thus making "dishes" suitable for specific tastes.

We can see that this mechanism of octopus can make them better adapt to the current environment, but everything is good and bad, and this mechanism will also lead to 23% to 4 1% gene isolation, which will lead to the slow evolution of octopus DNA. From this, we can easily infer that the gene of octopus should be relatively simple compared with other creatures on earth, but this is not the case. Studies have shown that octopus genes are very complex, with the number exceeding 30,000 (more than human beings 1 1,000), so conflicts arise.

So how to explain this contradiction? In this regard, a reasonable speculation is that octopus may really not be the "indigenous fish" of the earth, but should come from aliens.