The Market And Energy Page, T+235 -- September 12, 2017

The Close

Trifecta: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq end at records on the same day for first time in six weeks.

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Futures suggest market will extend gains.

NYSE:

• new highs, 123, including: Aetna (an insurer); Andeavor (a refiner); Baxter (whoo-hoo); CAT; Coca-Cola; Norfolk Southern; TransCanada (the Keystone XL folks).
• new lows, 5

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Notes for The Granddaughter 

Who Wants To Be A Marine Biologist

From this week's The London Review of Books, "The Sucker, The Sucker!" by Amia Srinivasan:

The octopus threatens boundaries.

Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength – a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers – means that octopuses are difficult to keep in captivity. Many octopuses have escaped their aquarium tanks through small holes; some have been known to lift the lid of their tank, making their way, sometimes across stretches of dry floor, to a neighbouring tank for a snack, or to the nearest drain, and maybe from there back home to the sea.

Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away.

Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting.

(Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.)

In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. 

That turns out to be exactly right. In Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, the 2004 edition (it has since been updated), p. 383, five hundred to six hundred million years ago:

The Lophotrochozoa include other worm-like phyla, for instance the nemertine worms, not to be confused with the nematodes....there are various other more-or-less worm-like phyla, but the biggest and most important phylum of the Lophotrochozoa is the Mollusca: the snails, oysters, ammonites, octopuses and their kind....[Squids], and their cousins the octupuses, are the most spectacularly proficient color-changers in the animal kingdom, streets better than the proverbial chameleons, not least because they change in quick time.

Octopuses, by the way, are color-blind.

From Evolution: The Whole Story, Thames & Hudson, Steve Parker, general editor, c. 2015, p. 125:

The gastropods, including slugs and snails ... are the largest group of molluscs, comprising about 80 percent of living species. Their fossil record reaches back to the Cambrian.

The cephalopods are the biggest and most intelligent of the molluscs. Their 500 million years of evolution have led to suckered tentacles (sic) to manipulate their environment, sophisticated eyes, the ability to change color, and complex social and learning skills.

Squid, octopuses and cuttlefish represent some of the 800 or so living cephalopod species, but 17,000 species have been identified in the fossil record of this highly diverse group.

Included in the extinct groups are enormous squid-like creatures -- orthocone nautiloids -- that swam from the Ordovician to the late Triassic (think dinosaur-age).