Did an ancient genomic reshuffling enable octopus intelligence evolution?

The sharper dissent targets the word “enabled.” Transposable elements and other genomic changes may have accumulated for selfish or neutral reasons rather than because they were selected to build intelligence. Their activity is compatible with beneficial and deleterious interpretations, so genome reshuffling may be a correlate or opportunity rather than the engine of cognition.

• Transposable-element activity has been proposed as a contributor to cephalopod brain evolution and cognitive flexibility, but it can also reflect selfish genomic replication.
• A genomic-ecology framework argues that organism-beneficial TE function requires expression patterns beyond what germline niche overlap predicts.
• Genome rearrangement is striking, but correlation with complex behavior does not by itself identify intelligence as its selected outcome.
• The evolutionary distance between octopuses and mammals makes their convergent intelligence a major explanatory puzzle, not a settled single-mechanism story.

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