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Jan 15, 2008 06:04 PM | 53
Cetacean brains, such as those of dolphins (left) and humpback whales (right), have even more cortical convolutions and surface area than human brains do. Does that mean they're smarter?
"Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges." Herman Melville.
Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain's legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of cetacean jujitsu, drowned poor Ahab by towing him into the abyss by the harpoon rope tangled around Ahab's remaining leg. "From Hell's heart I stab at thee!" Gulp. We humans pride ourselves on our big brains. We never seem to tire of bragging about how our supreme intelligence empowers us to lord over all other animals on the planet. Yet the biological facts don't quite square with Homo sapiens' arrogance. The fact is, people do not have the largest brains on the planet, either in absolute size or in proportion to body size. Whales, not people, have the biggest brains of any animal on earth. Just how smart are whales? Why do they have such big brains? Bigger is not always better; maybe the inflated whale brain is not very sophisticated on a cellular level. We're closer to answering such questions now, for a couple of recent papers address them squarely. What they find is helping separate fact from fiction. Size matters, but it's not everything The largest brain on earth belongs to the sperm whale, the same species as the main character in Melville's yarn. The adult sperm whale brain is 8,000 cubic centimeters. Our brain is about 1300 cubic centimeters. This is equivalent to the difference in engine displacement (the space in the cylinders) of a 1960s VW beetle compared with two and a half Formula One race cars. Porpoises and elephants, fellow mammals known for their extraordinary mental abilities, also have bigger brains than we humans. But that's not fair. Those animals are humongous. You need to take into account brain-to-body size. When this is done, the winner is .. well, the tree shrew, followed by humans and then porpoises. Okay, tree shrews have the biggest brain-to-body ratio because they have such tiny bodies. No one thinks tree shrews are intellectual giants. All this calculation does is bring us back to where we started -- humans and whales have very big brains. It is going to take more than a meat scale to distinguish any difference in the intellectual power between these brains. A look backwards In her new paper in PLOS Biology, Dr. Lori Marino of Emory University takes a look at the paleontological evidence. Humans are widely considered the most highly evolved species. Never mind that our DNA differs from the chimp's by only 2 percent; just look at how our head swelled, in only 3 million years, from the puny 380-cubic-centimeter brain of "Lucy", Australopithecus afarensis, to the modern 1300-cubic-centimeter cranial capacity of Homo sapiens. But consider the whale, whose closest living ancestor is the hippopotamus. The hippo's brain-to-body ratio is unimpressive for a mammal, 1.27, (similar to that of many sharks); nevertheless this modest brain is adequate for the cerebral challenges of a mud-wallowing life-style. Enormous evolutionary changes were required to transform a bog-dwelling tetrapod into a streamlined ocean-going Leviathan. "Adaptation of cetaceans to a fully aquatic lifestyle represents one of the most dramatic transformations in mammalian evolutionary history," Dr. Marino concludes. Dramatic transformations in physiology and body structure were required to realize the hippo's dream of roaming supreme in the ocean. Jettisoning legs, transforming forelimbs into flippers, moving the nostril to the top of the head, developing sonar, underwater vision and hearing -- these evolutionary advances raise the question of whether the process of becoming fully aquatic might have been related to the very large brain of whales. By carefully examining the fossil record she found that the sudden boost in brain size in ancestors to modern whales came 10 million years after their ancient ancestors became fully aquatic. This sinks the idea that transformation to an aquatic lifestyle inflated the whale brain. It wasn't the new environment alone that spurred the big brain. A closer look at the neuroanatomy of the human and whale brain reveals that the whale cerebral cortex is much more convoluted than the human cortex. The area of the human neocortical surface is 2,275 cm2 (about the size of a dinner napkin), but the common dolphin neocortical area is 3,745 cm2 (bigger than an unfolded news paper). The sperm whale? No one has measured it, but it's vastly larger than a newspaper. Applying the fudge factor of dividing cortical surface area by brain weight does not help: humans have a "gyrification index" of 1.75, but dolphins top out at 2.7, and the killer whale, a brilliant predator that hunts in packs, exceeds this. Marino concludes that evolution to an aquatic lifestyle cannot account for the large size of the whale brain. From the neuroanatomical evidence she concludes that the large whale brain supports a complex intelligence that is driven by the socially complex and highly communicative lifestyle of these predators. In support of this conclusion, baleen whales, which filter plankton and krill for food, do not have brains nearly as large, compared to body size, as toothed whales that hunt their food. From macro to micro Meanwhile, in another paper, "Total Neocortical Cell Number in the Mysticete Brain," Nina Eriksen and Bente Pakkenberg of the University of Copenhagen take the investigation of whale intelligence to a microscopic level and ask a simple question: If the whale brain is so much bigger than the human brain, does this mean it has more neurons? Logically, brain function and intelligence must relate to the number of neurons. Intelligence resides in the neocortex (the thin, convuluted "rind" of the brain) rather than in other, underlying areas devoted to controlling vital housekeeping functions for the body, so Eriksen and Pakkenberg focused their investigation there. The frontal lobes of the dolphin brain are comparatively smaller than in other mammals, but the researchers found that the neocortex of the Minke whale was surprisingly thick. The whale neocortex is thicker than that of other mammals and roughly equal to that of humans (2.63 mm). However, the layered structure of the whale neocortex is known to be simpler than that of humans and most other mammals. In particular, whales lack cortical layer IV, and thus have five neocortical layers to humankind's six. This means that the wiring of connections into and out of the neocortex is much different in whales than in other mammals. The researchers' cellular census revealed that the total number of neocortical neurons in the Minke whale was 12.8 billion. This is 13 times that of the rhesus monkey and 500 times more than rats, but only 2/3 that of the human neocortex. What can account for the fact that whales have bigger brains -- and similarly thick neocortexes -- but fewer neurons? Eriksen and Pakkenberg found that there were 98.2 billion non-neuronal cells, called glia, in the Minke whale neocortex. This is the highest number of glial cells in neocortex seen in any mammal studied to date. The ratio of neocortical glial cells to neocortical neurons is 7.7 to 1 in Minke whales and only 1.4 to 1 in humans. This finding may indicate a tendency for larger glia/neuron ratios as brain mass increases to support the growing neurons. But when one considers other recent research revealing that glia play an important role in information processing (see "The Other Half of the Brain," fromn Sci. Am. April 2004), one is left to wonder. Is the whale brain intellectually weaker than the human brain, or just different? They have fewer neurons but more glia, and in traditional views of the glia, the neurons count for much more. But if glia process information too, does the different ratio in Minke whales mean they think not more weakly but just much differently? We're now wondering, essentially, what goes on in a whale's head -- and why, if it's supposedly so smart, it doesn't have great works to show for it. Many have argued that humans dominate the planet because we have manipulative hands that enable us to make tools, be they harpoons or missiles. What would be the cetacean equivalent? One wonders how different life on earth might have been if humans, big brains and all, had flippers instead of hands -- and, perhaps, a lot more glia. R. Douglas Fields, who researches glia in his day job, frequently writes on neuroscience for Scientific American and Scientific American Mind.
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53 Comments
Add CommentIf whales are smarter, where's their Sistine Chapel painting? nuclear reactor? even their first combustion engine? or Magna Carter, Constitution? on and on and on. HOG WASH!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbeing smarter doesn't mean that whales would have to think abstractly, they could think in ways that are completly different than what we can relate to. by the way how could they create art or engines without hands to manipulate. there are ways of life that people may never fully understand, i mean imagine using sonar to find where you are because you are weak-sighted. life is too complex in other specices to ever be fully understood.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ Nora J
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid you read the last few sentences of the article? Humans have hands, whales have flippers that can't even touch each other. If humans lacked hands and had arms a little shorter than the upper forearm we never would have created the Sistine Chapel, the nuclear reactor, or even the combustion engine. Who is to say whales don't have an oral Magna Carta or Constitution?
I guess intelligence is measured by how well an animal like ourselves can overpopulate land that cannot naturally sustain large numbers of individuals, deplete natural resources, drive entire species of plants and animals into extinction, pollute the environment, poison themselves and eventually not only wipe themselves out but everything else with them. Does that sound intelligent? I don't think so. Whales have no use for such things. Their ability to thrive in the harsh environment of the worlds oceans without tools, "Sistine Chapels", "nuclear reactors", "constitutions" or lawyers for that matter stands testament to their superior intelligence. All this talk of intelligence being determined by body/weight ratios is completely ridiculous and is nothing more than yet another product of mans arrogance in the face of things greater than we are. I guess people figure since we can harpoon them, eat them, catch them in nets, throw them in giant fish tanks at sea world and make money from their suffering makes us superior. The incredible complexity of their languages, dialects and social structures are so advanced we may never be able to communicate with them other than with whistles and slaps on the water. With our "superior intelligence" we should have overcome this obstacle long ago, but no and we probably never will at this rate. We live in completely different worlds, we obviously have no understanding of our own place in the world, let alone theirs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans are at the top of the food chain. Just because you float around in the ocean all day making melancholic noises doesn't mean you're intelligent. Who know's, we might be better off with more extinct species. More room for humans to grow. Besides, if they were so smart they would of used their big brains to work out a way to communicate with us so as to politely ask us not to eat them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhales fight all the time.
if we are so smart why havent we figured out a way to communicate with them?? humans have a greater abilty to physically manipulate the environment, but even some of the greatest human minds have never created or built anything physical. consider some of the great philosiphers and theorists throughout history. building and inventing things is one way for a species to be successful, such as the human race has done, but this is not the only way. because whales are so perfectly adapted to thier environmental niche, there is no reason for them to invent anything. they are able to eat, reproduce, communicate, and live a social lifestyle, so what need would they have for invetions? until humans began to kill them, they had no need whatsoever. whales simply happen to be at a huge disadvantage now because they are so well adapted to an aquatic lifestyle, not a terrestrial one like ours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have some winners here today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"moving the nostril to the top of the head" I have watched many animals closely, and I have never yet seen one of them succeed at moving his nostrils. Placing emphasis on the verb "moving" makes it seem like an abrupt, conscious decision; rather than a hippopotamus that was born defective with a nostril in the wrong place that just happened to be advantageous at that moment AND which bred successfully to the next generation, a feat that would require another hippo of the opposite gender with the exact same mutation.
How about firebird's run-on sentence "I guess intelligence is measured by how well an animal like ourselves can overpopulate land..."
I suppose each of us can measure intelligence any way we wish. However, using his measure, bacteria come in at the top. ALL animals will overpopulate. In fact, that is a requirement of Darwinian evolution -- the stressor that selects one trait over others is more animals than resources.
As for Bobbox "Who is to say whales don't have an oral Magna Carta or Constitution?"
I'll volunteer to say it. They don't have an oral Magna Carta or Constitution. They beep, they eat, they make cute little whales.
For mud: "life is too complex in other specices to ever be fully understood." Maybe so, but why are you here? Scientific American exists for people that think Life, and a great many other things, CAN be understood.
seanclarkmv: "if we are so smart why havent we figured out a way to communicate with them?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis question cannot be answered. If you attend any of the showings of killer whales at a Sea World, you will see effective communication with the whales.
"whales simply happen to be at a huge disadvantage now because they are so well adapted to an aquatic lifestyle, not a terrestrial one like ours."
Given that around 3/4 of the earth is covered in oceans, it may seem that whales have whatever advantage you suppose belongs to terrestrial animals.
However, you did hint at an important factor -- traits develop when evolutionary advantage attaches to the mutation. So far as my recent reading reveals, scientists are still working on exactly what is the advantage of intelligence. It certainly plays a role in adaptability. Ocean temperatures are not all that extreme, ranging from 0 to about 25 C; but terrestrial temperature range is about three times larger; requiring environmental manipulation to live in extreme climates. Environmental modification requires some degree of intelligence. I believe subarctic climates require the strongest environmental modifications hence select for higher intelligence. In other words, the children of Lake Woebegone really are all (slightly) above average.
"Whales, not people, have the biggest brains of any animal on earth. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSCIAM: Can you please spell Earth with a capital E. You're not talking about "earth" as in dirt, you're talking about Planet Earth. Get it right.
Humans need rich food, clean water, and clean air to live. Those are our only real needs. Whales have the same needs. The difference is, each whale can meet its own needs, whereas most humans are inept and incapable, as a result of specialization, thus "requiring" skyscrapers, jobs, cars, wars and all the rest. If we had endless crill pools to eat to our hearts content, and no use for houses, it's likely we wouldn't bother with all this stuff either. The net long-term result of all of it is destructive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey "beep"? Sure, if by "beep" you mean a global communications network of incredibly sophisticated frequency modulation conveying at the very least, counting, simple math, basic astronomy, a social language... and that's only what little we've been able to discern from mountains of data in a few decades of research. We've barely scratched the surface of being able to understand this ancient species.
The only way you could not know about whales being intelligent is if you knew nothing at all about them and decided to form an opinion anyway.
hotblack: "Humans need rich food, clean water, and clean air to live. Those are our only real needs."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you, thank you! I was beginning to wonder if it was possible to actually have a discussion here!
Humans need a LOT more than what you have listed including a very narrow temperature range over which unprotected humans can live, but I'll agree that your list is certainly vital.
Your analysis is interesting but I feel I must correct some misunderstandings for readers. You are being excessively subtle and establishing non-visible parameters. You say "each whale can meet its own needs, whereas most humans are inept and incapable" -- if that were true, there would simply not be "most humans". It is the nature of human "ept" to utilize tools more effectively than chimpanzees using sticks to get termites, or whales blowing bubbles to concentrate krill. It is our NATURE and to compare a human without his "ept" to a whale WITH his "ept" is an improper and meaningless comparison.
"The only way you could not know about whales being intelligent is if you knew nothing at all about them and decided to form an opinion anyway."
Bad logic. It is sort of like dividing by zero. You are not supposed to be able to do it at all; it is "undefined". Thus, in the context of knowledge of whales, what is DEFINED is what is learned; everything that is not learned is simply not defined. There is no "way" to the path of unlearned; all paths lead to learning. Thus, the way to not learning is not really a path at all, it is the null path.
Since we don't have a working definition of "intelligent" it is really quite pointless to argue. If we agreed on some definition, and a measure, and agreed that whales are "intelligent", what then? The topic isn't intelligence; the topic is "smarter" and that is a whole different thing in my opinion. Smart, to me, speaks to results! Intelligence is, to me, more related to passive awareness and perception -- problem solving ability, but it doesn't become action necessarily.
What a thoroughly unscientific question, "Are we smarter?" Whales who communicate and navigate by making sense of sound waves that we don't even pay attention to have brains that are clearly more capable in processing that data. Humans are clearly more capable of using tools and manipulating our environments. But which gauge are you proposing we use to determine an over-arching smartness? There is no single measurement, as all teachers know -- and quite possibly no reliable, objective measurement in all of our scientific toolkit to date!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisU peepl iz crayzee.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat statement is a perfect example of why humans are smarter, more intelligent or whatever you want to call it than not just whales, but all other species on this planet.
By reading the above statement and (hopefully) understanding it you've shown many of the skills our species has acquired to be in our position.
Off the top of my head they would be:
1) A written language
-allowing us to preserve our knowledge
-which in turn allows to build upon rather than to relearn knowledge
-ability to share knowledge with virtually any other member of our species (yes, I know that would require translation in most cases... which just goes to show yet another ability)
2) Pattern recognition and problem solving.
-nothing in the first line is a word in the English language, yet a third grader should be able to use these skills to figure out what is meant
Somebody mentioned that we are an arrogant species and for the most part I concur. However, in this instance it is justified.
Oh, and here's a third:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-creativity... I know I'm not going to win a Pulitzer, but I had to come up with a phase that was obviously wrong but still understandable.
What great works do humans have to "show for it"? Creating piles of fissionable waste might our lasting contribution. In the meanwhile, we can't even afford to give kids in Detroit schools art classes. Whales are swimming freely in the sea, not sitting in cubicles typing on computers. What do you want to do when you "retire"??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSRS- I don't even see a coherent thought in what you just wrote. However, it's still better than what a whale, dolphin, dog or whatever can do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlain to see a comparison is not merely "are humans smarter than whales" or vice versa, one may well observe that some humans are smarter than others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet us honor the asker of a question by answering them.
SRS: "What great works do humans have to "show for it"?"
I regret that space does not permit me to make a list. Fortunately, the internet is a conduit to repositories of information that will give you a good start on an answer.
Now then, I might suggest that humans display whales, but, so far as I know, whales do not display humans. One might suppose that whales merely do not wish to do so, but that suggests a lack of curiosity, one of the hallmarks of intelligence (IMO).
SRS "Creating piles of fissionable waste might our lasting contribution."
It will certainly be someone's lasting contribution. My own lasting contribution will perhaps be a photographic history of this era. What will be your lasting contribution?
"In the meanwhile, we can't even afford to give kids in Detroit schools art classes."
Who is "we"? I probably could do so, if I chose not to give my own kids an education. You appear able to afford a computer, so perhaps you could sponsor a kid in a Detroit school art class. Anyway, I am not so sure what makes Detroit kids and art classes so special. Are we able to afford everything else and that is the only thing missing from total happiness?
SRS: "Whales are swimming freely in the sea"
That is what they do.
SRS:"sitting in cubicles typing on computers."
That is what you and I do. This is not news. What would be news is for you to go swimming freely in the sea or a whale sitting in a cubicle responding to website articles.
SRS: "What do you want to do when you "retire"??" I don't know, ask me again when I do but it'll have to be in some other forum than discussing whale smartness.
Seems like an interesting article, but I couldn't finish it. Very difficult to read? Didn't any of your English teachers introduce you to the concept of "paragraphs"? They divide the text up into digestible chunks, making them easier to absorb, and also making it easier to find your place again when your gaze wanders momentarily from the text.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou should give it a try. It will make your contributions much more readable.
Computer processors get more "intelligent" while getting smaller by increasing the # of functions it can do simultaneously and the speed it can do them as well and I think improvements in materials as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoesn't it make more sense that something biologically analogous is going on with the brain of animals as their intelligence grows?
Some examples....
Increase the # of synapses between individual cells
Increase the multi-functional ability of brain cells as well as their ability to do so simultaneously (like computer processors kind of)
Enable cells to pursue individual processes while simultaneously functioning as part of a greater grouping of related brain cells to handle yet another function.
Improve the biochemical engine and make it faster than less intelligent animals. This may sound odd, but we humans take all sorts of drugs that play with our mental processes and some however imperfectly seem to increase intellectual abilities. A creature therefore could evolve the key chemical elements involved in that and make it part of its system thus embedding the enhancement the chemical causes.
Of course the specifics of these things are not known because so much time is wasted trying to correlate brain size with brain intelligence.
If one thing is certain birds demonstrate the nonsense illogic behind the research.
The fact that the brain/body ratio of birds is not so extreme as their deviation from "total brain size" vs. a vs. other intelligent species should be a clue. The deviation is simply too extreme to be accounted for by being the right ratio if "size alone" has any significance.
One day this will go by the wayside along with counting the bumps on a person's head as a way of measuring their abilities.
Until then researchers will labor fruitlessly, because looking at the brain size in any way is much like not seeing the forest for all of the trees.
There is another, simpler, way to look at this. Whales don't need to walk, thus they don't need hip bones in exactly the right place, thus there's nothing stopping them from having really, really big brained babies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHuman brains are as big as they can be. Any bigger and their mothers would either A) not be able to walk, or B) die in childbirth. We are limited by this, whales are not. Thus, it is quite likely we evolved toward greater brain efficiency whereas whales just kept getting bigger yet inefficient brains.
Perhaps your engine analogy should be something like the human sport-bike displacement brain compared to the whale tractor displacement brain. It's all about power to weight :)
If whales are so smart, why don't they have thumbs? :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCool article, but the engine displacement analogy is about as useful as a shot to the groin, and much more misleading. Yes, Formula 1 cars have far more power than '60's VW beetles, but this has very little to do with their displacement as the output per litre is also much greater. (1965 VW Beetle: 1.2 litres, 40 hp = 33.3 hp/L; F1 Car: 2.4 litres, 800+ hp = 333.33 hp/L)
So, while it looks like you make a pure size comparison, you are actually relying on the common conception that an F1 car is much more powerful than a Beetle, (and adding a multiplier), without addressing the fact that displacement does not have the same relationship with power between the two vehicles, that we could reasonably assume the relationship between a whale and human brain to have. Yeah, one does does have more power and displacement, but each is also a completely different kind of thing; the brains probably aren't
Do you mean to say that whales have some sort of neural superchargers which we lack, giving them a boost in virtue of size as well as a per equivalent unit? Because that is what your analogy implies...
Interestingly enough, you can get a new Beetle in 2.3, 2.5, or even 3.2 L, which makes them close to or similar in terms of displacement to an F1 car. But I don't think that New v. Old Beetle has the same disparity in performance on which the power of your analogy rests.
Don't know if you just missed this glaring fact, or maybe you wrote this for whales who are too dumb to catch it. :)
Can't believe no one's quoted this yet. From Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
Good Post alexoneal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems narrow minded of all these comments suggesting that intelligence is related to construction or technology in a way that makes the lack of those things equal the lack of intelligence.
You might need intelligence to accomplish these technological feats, so that our cultural and tech developments are a pretty good indicator of our intelligence as a species (although ants engineer housing and bridges, and some pretty unintelligent animals can use tools) , but not accomplishing them does not automatically imply a lack of intellingence.
I have no idea how intelligence dolphins or whales are, but it is a fallacy to declare them unintelligent because they don't build things like we do.
We could find out in the future through further testing that they are as smart as we are, or smarter, or we could determine they are just dumb mammal fish. But skipping the real science that would figure this out and just applying arrogant human-centric misperceptions to the dicussion, won't get you any closer to the real answers here.
*sorry for the spelling errors, I didn't check my typing closely enough.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEmperor - You got the gist of it - well done. I'd only add symbolic representation of abstract concepts, which is perhaps the internal analog to external written language, and separate language from persistent writing. On whole, it is the ability to learn the precise thoughts of predecessors that allow the incremental accumulation of information and advancement of knowledge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGetting back to the brain physiology question, the critical subject not addressed by the article is the distinctive physiological functional differentiation of specific neural networks that distinguishes species' intellectual abilities.
Much like a chicken straddling a vertical line on the ground, I found myself mesmerized by the appearance of an entire article contained in a single paragraph...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ Nora J
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe the fact that they haven't made a nuclear reactor or the combustion engine means they are smarter.
Maybe they understand that destroying the environment they live in is detrimental to their species.
Which makes them smarter than humans.
@ mggordon
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf your such a world renowned Biologist, how about you post a link to some papers you have published.
Because if you have no expertise in this field, then your just spewing ignorant assumptions.
@ alexoneal
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerfect!
I missed all the colorful replies to this. It does sound as though the points in my earlier post was largely misinterpreted, but the conversation is so old now it hardly seems worth a follow-up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt'd be nice if like every other forum software on the planet, Sciam gave you the option to click on your name and see a list of your previous posts so you could follow up on them again.
Agreed, Alexoneal, (& Douglas Adams) you nailed it.
Who knows maybe when whales are singing, they are singing about quantum gravity,and faster than light travel or communications,or maybe some ages old wonderful literature.You don't need hands to tell story's.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about some paragraph breaks. Paragraphs with 1400+ words do not signify much intelligence at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about some paragraph breaks. Paragraphs with 1400+ words do not signify much intelligence at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt might be that the added brainpower of the whale is devoted toward motor-sensory processing and memory rather than deductive thought. Thus we have our Sistine Chapels and they have the ability to identify mating calls from half an ocean away.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe high cortex surface area and the high number of glia hint at the capacity for the whale to learn, or it may be residual from a period when they had to learn a new way of life (say...when they left land). They are perfectly suited for their environment, and they are in no need of evolutionary progression (I guess they could use an exoskeleton) . For the life they live, they are perfectly suited. Man, on the other hand, has had to use his brain to survive threats, to find food, and to protect children. We have leaped ahead of other animals intellectually. One of the principles of evolutionary biology is efficiency- don't use it is you don't have to. I believe there was a time when they had to use that big brain, but they have reached the pinnacle of intellectual necessity now (problems with humans not included. That has occurred to rapid for them to evolve, or think, there way out of it).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishow bout double posts. whales would not do that
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat are the six layers of the cortex for? This would seem to suggest that perhaps there is a connection between the missing layer and the extra glial cells, no? Perhaps without layer six Whales need a different ratio of cell types, is anyone investigating this?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit seems to me if whales lack a layer of cortex but have extra glial cells that one may be a consequence of the other. Is anyone investigating this possibility?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisalexoneal
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDouglas Adams is of course the best source to answer the author's question.
Another point yet undiscussed: In addition to Natural selection, Darwin described the Sexual version of selection too.
Wouldn't it be a valid assumption that whales (and humans) needed the brains to get sex?
Most humans I know prefer sexual partners with wits to boring ones.
Whales have complex accoustic communications. Those whales who don't understand that communications have no chance to mate.
And humans are not smart enough to understand the languages of the whales. So, they must be indeed much smarter.
sangambayard-c-m.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Hogwash" ????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis kind of publication is supposed to be a call for conversation and thought, not for snap judgements and dismissive attitudes.
I'm super surprised at how quick to attack this article people have been.
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- Albert Einstein
My argument is that he's is smarter than you.
Has white space and paragraphs become expensive since I've been away? Is their neurobiological research on the stupefying effects of readability? Is your brother a wall-of-text contractor and this is your way of kicking some back?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe real question:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are humans so stupid?
No but intelligence could be measured by the ability to recognize that a species has overwhelmed the plants resources and it's attempt to correct that mistake?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBrain development allowed man’s ancestor to be aware of the existence of that which he did not know. This very point is a blessing and a sin: once you know what you don’t know, and when you establish that you are ignorant regarding any issue, one can then doubt himself concerning anything. It is at this point that humans could act in a manner that was not true to their selves. Man is capable of performing an action while simultaneously acknowledging to himself that he is doing something that he believes to be morally wrong. On the other hand, animals are not able to act in a contrived, disingenuous way such as this; a dog cannot lie. Animals are unable to act in any way other than their proper place in the world. This unique human characteristic is the source of much disconnectedness between man and his actions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bane of humanity is allowing the motives behind one’s desire to learn and gain knowledge of the world to change: when one desires to fully explain all facets of the world, not out of child-like wonderment and curiosity, but in an effort to control and exploit it. This noisome mentality serves to illustrate how one has removed the “spirit” from their “in-spiration” and once again lost sight of why it is amazing to be alive, why it was that one had enjoyed living life, and what are the sources that feed one’s vitality.
Remember that evolution is not a synonym for improvement. It means change, mutations. Whether a change is 'better' or 'worse' than any other is not based on its newness, but on its ability to sustain life. To wit: humans having evolved latest does not make us the best, or the pinnacle of evolution; it just means we have had less time to test our adaptations. Humanism is speciesism, and analogous to racism or classism. In quantifiable terms, bacteria is the best evolved because it is most proven to survive environmental changes.
if evolutionary ranking is to be done on a qualitative scale, and the quality of life is necessarily derived from the quality of one's environment as a collective, it follows that the species that does the most to preserve the well-being of all life has the best life. Or, in the negative, the species that does the least amount of damage to other life forms has the least diminished quality of life. To be deemed best life form, we must show that we have done the least harm to other species. Such is undeniably false, having, as a species, spent the majority of recent history in reckless pursuit of self-glorification directly and actively through the destruction of life and natural ecosystems. Multitudes of species are extinct because of our influence on ecosystems, and massive swaths of growing tree forms and their inhabitants are decimated daily in order to ease our every day life by making the world ‘disposable,’ a horrible delusion if one was ever heard.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur consumption without thought to consequence is objectification of nature, a symptom of our humanist superiority complex. Luckily, evolution and existence are continual, and we perceive ourselves as having free will, so we can change any of our actions anytime. To become a species which is improving our quality of life, to approach the greatness we assume ourselves to have, we must inform our actions not through our desires, but rather inform our actions through our understanding of the greater natural good, acting according to the needs of the lives around us. When we can look at ourselves and find no action that threatens to diminish the healthy perpetuation of life, when we look at our impact on nature and see that we do not take more than we return, that our actions never decrease the overall level of sustenance, then we can begin to understand what it is to be great, to be a species worthy of having evolved. For then we are an integrated part of a system that serves to perpetuate itself and thereby protect and perpetuate all things that are its make-up. In short, never forget your subjectivity, and thereby your reliance upon symbiotic cycles. To view yourself as separate from nature is to lose sight of nature’s sway over you.
"If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand what he said. Why do I say such a thing?... To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. It's what we do and who we are that gives meaning to our words. I can't understand the lion's language, because I don't know what his world is like. How can I know the world a lion inhabits? Do I fail to understand him because I can't peer into his mind?" - Wittgenstein
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my view, what makes humans more interesting than whales is our capacity to create. Sure the whale has all its basic needs met in the ocean but that isn't very interesting. However, I agree it would be extremely fascinating to see if whales could develop the capacity to create, (and what they would create) if they had something like hands with which to manipulate their surroundings.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne day perhaps we will measure intelligence not by the fancy tools we create ie: nuclear reactors, space shuttles, cars, etc. but by how we react with the ecosystems that keep us alive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact if humans have any chance of surviving the terrible ecological devastation they are creating right now on this planet we will need to look to whales, dolphins, and top predators to learn how to live in balance with nature.
Our technology has far surpassed our humanity (as Einstein put it). As a species we simply are not intelligent enough to deal with the level of technology we have created. A few of us maybe, but the writhing throng of humanity is a shameful dance with destruction.
Whales have a better sense of ecological harmony and living close to nature something we are trying to deny ourselves by believing we are separate from the planet and "special". We have much to learn from whales. Those saying we are smarter, please shut up, thank you.
Your definition of "intelligence" is extremely limited to the human experience. Do you think a WHALE would look at any of those things you just listed, such as paintings or political doctrines, and think to itself, "My goodness! those humans are so smart!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoubtful. More than likely our best "proofs" of intelligence mean jack-sh*t to a whale and their lives. It is likely the same with the Whale to Human experience. IF whales are intelligent, conscious, self-aware, whatever (a big if) it's doubtful we could ever even 'appreciate' their works of 'art' or 'science' or 'math'
They may be singing algebraic equations to one another for all we know ;)
"Success" to a whale may not necessitate a well-crafted poem or political doctrine, but rather, the ability to eat and reproduce without interference. Or the ability to sing a "song" that tells his whale buddies that there is no more food in region X,Y,Z of the Atlantic/Gulf mixture and that they should not waste their time...etc.
If "tools" are your only measure of "intelligence" then of course humans are smart and everything else is dumb.
A whale doesn't need to paint, they can sing images into their friends' brains. They don't need "power plants", they can get all the energy they need from the ocean...
So, who's smarter?
I've been involved in three different Interspecies Communications projects in my life and I can say with confidence that Cetaceans are Intelligent and understand the concept of language. Two were private ventures I cannot discuss without approval. The third is Dr. Lilly's JANUS project. I have many hundreds of hours of hands on experience with Orcas and Dolphins. I've swum with both wild and captive Dolphins.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is really needed is a way to communicate, to be able to converse with this Intelligence and learn more about it. Sign Language, fancy keyboards, and recorded whistles have been tried in various forms over the past thirty years with little to no real breakthroughs. Technological hardware changes over the years appear to have made little difference in these areas. It seems clear to me from my experiences that these are not the way to go. Especially with a species whose primary sense is sound. Humans are primarily visual.
The Primary Issue is *frequency* not language. First we have to be able to hear and speak to each other properly in order to communicate.
The majority of Cetacean vocal / hearing range [ 20 Khz up to 250 Khz for some species ] is above the human hearing range [ tops out at 20-22 Khz ]. Humans are simply not designed to hear what Cetaceans are saying nor are Humans designed to speak in their range as well as the reverse being true. Effectively it is the same issue as being able to communicate with a deaf/mute Human. Just because a deaf/mute Human cannot hear us or speak to us does not mean they are not Intelligent or are unable to communicate with us in some other fashion. Somehow I think Sign Language or keyboards would be a bit difficult for Cetaceans, with the lack of thumbs and all. Because of this some other type of technology is required for effective and useful communication to take place. Some sort of device that can translate between the Human hearing/vocal range and the Cetacean hearing/vocal range.
Surprisingly enough such a device has been around since 1945 that could do this job. It just has never been applied to this problem as far as I'm aware, or maybe it has.
You can hear this device in operation in the last half of the Haro Strait recording here http://killerwhaletales.blogspot.com/ what they call the "Metallic Voice".
My friends and I hope someday that the Human race will wake up to the fact that they are *not* the only Intelligence on the planet.
http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b171/OrcinusOrca/LJ/MeKotar.jpg
They don't have opposable thumbs.
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