are they saying that empathy goes back 500 million years ?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/20/mdma-makes-octopuses-more-sociable Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev Thu 20 Sep 2018 16.56 BST The undersea and the ecstasy: MDMA leaves octopuses loved up Normally antisocial sea creature becomes friendly and tactile after being given the drug, scientists say What happens when you give an octopus MDMA? It sounds like a question that might flit through the meandering mind of someone who had been dabbling in psychedelics. But now the matter has become the focus of an unlikely-sounding scientific experiment to uncover the ancient origins of social behaviour. By showing that the normally antisocial sea creature became friendly and tactile after being given MDMA, also known as ecstasy, scientists believe they have made a link between the social behaviours of humans and a species from which we are separated by more than 500m years of evolution. Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins Unive
