Darwin

The young Sigmund Freud made drawings of the nervous systems of crayfish and lamprey, showing that their nervous systems were basically similar to--human beings.

Paper wasps can learn and recognize the faces of other paper wasps. Bees recognize the patterns and smells and colors of particular flowers, remember their locations and communicate these to other bees.

Earthworms, octopus, squid, sea snails, jellyfish, turn out to have vastly complex and highly evolved nervous systems, some with fully developed image-forming eyes not so different from our own.

Darwin claimed there was "plant electricity" as well as "animal electricity", though animal electricity moved roughly a thousand times faster. His last book was a thorough study of earthworms, in which he was moved to write, after observing their behavior under stress, that worms "deserve to be called intelligent, for they act in nearly the same manner as a man under similar circumstances."

Kristin Calabrese is a painter. One of her paintings, pictured above, hangs in the dining room of my home in San Francisco. If you look closely you'll see the painting manifesting a mind of its own, evolving into something it wasn't when it was first conceived, exhibiting behavior neither the maker or the observer could have ever foreseen.