Are Octopi Actually Aliens?

No, they're not. See you next week.

Okay, hang on, I'm not quite finished yet.

Pictured: Not an alien

The octopus. They're very strange creatures, and there's nothing on Earth quite like them. That's part of the reason they're so captivating to people. So is it possible that the cause of the octopuses otherworldliness is that they're from another world? That's what a group of scientists are claiming, and while you might want to dismiss them as being crazy, they have credentials. These are legitimate scientists, and they've published a legitimate study.

Things start off fine, they note the dramatic differences in the octopus, compared with squid and cuttlefish, their closest relatives, and the nautilus, the cephalopod common ancestor. And that's fine, octopi do have many features that sort of just appeared, evolutionarily speaking. That sort of thing is unusual in biology. But where things go south is when they claim that the reason for this is extraterrestrial influence during the Cambrian explosion, either from alien viruses that modified squid DNA, or from full-on fertilized octopus eggs, suspended in deep freeze for millions of years on an alien comet, landing on Earth and suddenly coming to life. It's a wild theory, and if you ignore the fact that we know the octopus genome, and the split between octopus and squid happened 135 million years ago instead of 500 million years ago, and if you squint, it almost makes sense.

Okay, it really doesn't make any sense. But this wild, off-the-wall theory does serve a point. There's still a lot of science we don't know, and sometimes, you need wild theories to push the boundaries of traditional thinking. Oh sure, most will be wildly wrong (see: octopuses are aliens), but occasionally, they'll be right, or at least point us in the right direction.

Positive Evolutionary Mutations Not Entirely Random

These beaks may not have evolved through random chance.

If anybody remembers their high school biology (and let's be honest, you probably don't, I barely do), you might remember learning about how evolution is random.  A species lives or dies on how lucky it gets.  If it gets a favorable mutation, it allows the species to survive and reproduce in changing conditions while other species, or even members of the same species, die off.  It's all about passing on random advantageous mutations to offspring.

A new study seems to disagree with that tried and true approach to evolution.  It found that most of the time, mutations occur not at random, but at so called "mutational hot spots".  These are places where DNA mis-pairing often occurs, but at crucial junctures within the sequence; so that during protein formation, instead of the mutation being repeated out, it remains in between sequences of normal DNA in order to preserve the function of the protein.  This combination of factors, DNA mis-pairing during replication and the need to preserve protein function, is probably what allows evolution to occur so rapidly during times of great upheaval in the environment, and more importantly, it just seems a bit more elegant.  Random chance happens, of course, but scientists aren't big fans of random, and the random nature of natural selection just didn't feel right.