Andrew Packard

Andrew Packard, M.A., DSc. is an old ally of Bill Gilly in the chromatophore world.  Through the Looking Glass recounts his participant-observer investigations of individual octopus and squids – behaviour, physiology, anatomy and ontogeny – while the more readable Visual Tactics describes their place in an evolutionary psychology.

The work, conducted at the Naples Zoological Station, betrays an inability to dissociate the parts from the whole, and Andrew makes a virtue of this in his principle of conformity – illustrated by the fast waves of colour that develop on one side of the mantle of a squid some days after severing its nerve supply (video area c. 2x3cm). Gilly and Todd Anderson have christened the approach “chromatoholism”.

Andrew joined John B Cobb in criticizing gene-centered evolutionary theory. His last contribution to the debate on the Role of Behaviour in evolution re-introduces feelings as agents of selection.