My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher had given her that claims not only spiders but also centipedes, scorpions and snails for the insect class.
Anyway, this is about a science book that’s actually good and, as far as I can tell, accurate. Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith focuses on the minds of octopuses and how their intelligence compares to ours. Overall verdict: Ink-redible.
Out of 31 animal phyla, only three contain species with complex, active bodies: The chordates (including us mammals), the arthropods (including insects), and one group of mollusks, the cephalopods (squids, octopuses, cuttlefish, nautilus). While ants and other arthropods are collectively quite capable, there are no individually smart arthropods, which means that cephalopds are the group of smart animals that are evolutionarily most distant to humans and other mammals. Or, less clumsily put:
[They are] an island of mental complexity in a sea of invertebrate animals … probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.
Nehaveigur 