Numerical answer
The four sentences below, when properly sequenced, form a coherent paragraph. Decide on the correct order and key in the sequence of numbers as your answer.
1. Octopuses, remarkably, achieve comparable feats of camouflage and problem-solving despite having a nervous system that diverged from ours over half a billion years ago.
2. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are located not in its central brain but distributed along its eight arms, each of which can taste, touch and even solve simple problems with a striking degree of independence.
3. For a long time, intelligence in the animal kingdom was studied almost exclusively through the lens of vertebrate brains, mammals and birds in particular, on the assumption that a single, centralised brain was a near-prerequisite for complex behaviour.
4. This decentralised architecture suggests that centralised control, long assumed necessary for sophisticated behaviour, may be just one of several evolutionary paths to intelligence.
1. Octopuses, remarkably, achieve comparable feats of camouflage and problem-solving despite having a nervous system that diverged from ours over half a billion years ago.
2. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are located not in its central brain but distributed along its eight arms, each of which can taste, touch and even solve simple problems with a striking degree of independence.
3. For a long time, intelligence in the animal kingdom was studied almost exclusively through the lens of vertebrate brains, mammals and birds in particular, on the assumption that a single, centralised brain was a near-prerequisite for complex behaviour.
4. This decentralised architecture suggests that centralised control, long assumed necessary for sophisticated behaviour, may be just one of several evolutionary paths to intelligence.
Show answer and solution
Answer: 3124
Sentence 3 sets up the old assumption (centralised vertebrate brains as prerequisite for intelligence). Sentence 1 introduces the octopus as a counter-example despite this assumption. Sentence 2 gives the specific anatomical detail (distributed neurons in the arms) that explains why the octopus is such a counter-example. Sentence 4 then draws the general conclusion from that detail ("this decentralised architecture suggests..."), forming a logical close. The order is 3-1-2-4.
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