In the new Prime documentary series “Octopus!” actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge spends an hour and a half narrating a story about an octopus named Doris that sets out on her own, falls in love and heroically sacrifices her own life to give her 30,968 children a chance at survival. But ultimately, the series takes a surprising turn to suggest that it might be time to stop anthropomorphizing animals — and instead get real about the risks they face.
Anthropomorphism, or our tendency to ascribe human traits or behaviors to other species, can be traced back to Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection indicated that all species shared a common ancestor and therefore likely shared other traits and behaviors. Yet anthropomorphism was increasingly seen as a form of bias that did not align with the scientific method emerging in the 19th century.
Octopuses are having their moment under the sun, with a flurry of books and documentaries released about them in the past decade. I remember being moved by the close bond author Sy Montgomery forms with one of these cephalopods in “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration in the Wonder of Consciousness.” In the Netflix documentary, “My Octopus Teacher,” filmmaker Craig Foster documents the life and death of an octopus in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa. Then in 2022, “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” went viral, too.
It’s no wonder that these creatures have caught our attention. They can navigate mazes, use tools and unscrew jars — sometimes from the inside out. They can distinguish between different people and remember them over time. In “The Soul of an Octopus,” one octopus sneaks out of its cage at night to steal fish from a nearby tank, returns to its habitation and covers the lid back on it so as not to be discovered.
"Octopus!" (Courtesy of Prime)These characteristics are compared to human traits, leading many to conclude that octopuses are remarkably intelligent. But as Piero Amodio, an animal behavior and cognition researcher in Napoli featured in “Octopus!” says in the series, the idea of intelligence is a human one.
The last ancestor humans have in common with the octopus is more than twice as old as the first dinosaurs. Humans have close to 100 billion neurons in their brain, but octopuses have 500 million neurons spread across their entire bodies, including in their eight tentacles that they use to taste the world around them.
Octopuses are simply different creatures. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes in “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness,” they are “the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
“If we can connect with them as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over,” Godfrey-Smith wrote.
For decades, scientists could be laughed at for suggesting that dogs “smile” at their owner or chimpanzees “kiss” after a conflict to make up. After all, scientific studies are designed to eliminate as many potential biases that could influence what is being observed as possible — and our own human perception is inherently biased.
In a 2007 review on anthropomorphism, Clive D. L. Wynne, an ethologist at the University of Florida, concluded that “the study of animal cognition will only proceed effectively once it rids itself of pre-scientific notions like anthropomorphism.”
In light of the fact that we humans cannot entirely remove ourselves from our own subjective experiences, others have pushed back against the idea that anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals and suggested that it could be used to our advantage. In a 2000 paper, behavioral ecologist Mark Bekoff argued that “anthropomorphism allows other animals’ behavior and emotions to be accessible to us.”
Could putting ourselves in another animal’s shoes — anthropomorphically speaking — actually help us understand them better?
We may be projecting our own behaviors onto animals in experiments like these, but doing so could ultimately benefit us and them.
In 1979, an important study by Frans de Waal demonstrated how using science to test for a human hunch could help further our understanding of animal behavior. Chimpanzees had been witnessed coming together to “kiss” after a conflict. To test what was going on in these interactions, Waal compared how body language changed between pairs of chimpanzees who had recently fought and others who had not.
What he found was that chimps who had fought would come together afterward to touch mouths, extend a hand or touch their former opponent. In contrast, chimps who had fought could sometimes be “consoled” by other chimpanzees who had not participated in the conflict through different embraces.
Further studies showed how important this reconciling behavior is for primate health, reducing indicators of stress like an elevated heart rate. It also reduces the likelihood that individuals will fight again.
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In 2014, Waal said his career was largely dedicated to unwinding human exceptionalism, or the view that we are somehow different than other animals. "I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit," he said.
We may be projecting our own behaviors onto animals in experiments like these, but doing so could ultimately benefit us and them. Studies show that empathizing with animals influences human behavior and can motivate people to take action to protect them. This makes sense evolutionarily: Various species can recognize other individuals in their same species, and have developed protective mechanisms to enhance their survival.
Conservation efforts often rally behind “flagship species” like the giant panda, polar bear or bald eagle in order to save the entire habitat in which those species live. This doesn’t work all the time: Polar bears, along with almost half of the world's animal species, are still declining. But conservationists have successfully rehabilitated giant pandas and bald eagles, which are both still endangered but moving toward recovery.
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"Octopus!" features contrasting perspectives from Amodio, who cautions against anthropomorphism, and Sabrina Imbler, a writer who specializes in writing from the point of view of animals. Ultimately, the series lets viewers come to their own conclusions about how much or how little we should be projecting ourselves onto other species, falling in line with a new era of nature documentaries in which filmmakers seem to be increasingly aware of the character that the human gaze can play. Instead, they allow viewers to make their own conclusions about the animals featured.
Waller-Bridge seems to be disappointed when she discovers her beloved Doris is her own individual, who is not in fact living the fairy tale storyline she has constructed for her.
It's a natural human tendency to anthropomorphize other species, and, according to Darwin, there is something shared between all of us — even if it traces back tens of millions of years ago. Yet “Octopus!” challenges us to embrace a middle ground when studying the other species we share the planet with. Maybe, moving forward, we can learn to admire the characteristics species like the octopus have that are different from ours — just as much as the ones we share.
"Octopus!" is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
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