Tuna just doesn’t taste right, anymore, now that there’s no dolphin in it.
Racist.
Yes it is. Whale tastes like a high quality cut of beef with a slightly fishy aftertaste. It is delicious.
That’s occurred to me too, but without knowing any other concepts of intelligence, the only gauge we have is our own. I guess that could change when we find out more about them.
I think there are a couple of things that suggest their intelligence wouldn’t operate much different from ours: 1) being mammals, they’re relatively close to us on the evolutionary tree, so their brains and ours must be fairly similar, and 2) despite the radical differences in evironment, body type and technical ability, cetaceans have devised food gathering strategies remarkably similar to what humans have.
I can understand the motivation to do it, but yeah, it’s unworkable and basically silly.
Damn, I was out of the loop on that one, too. Had to do a search and found out about Chicken of the Sea (we don’t get that here). But the circular irony isn’t lost on me–calling a mammal Fish of the Sea as a play on Chicken of the Sea which is really fish of the sea. I’m dizzy.
Your question suggests its own answer: the ability to solve novel problems of salience to the entity.
It then becomes no more different than comparing different subtest scores of human IQ batteries. The “global” or alleged “general intelligence” (g) number becomes less meaningful and the understanding of different sorts of intelligences vastly enlarged. Guess what? Humans will test very poorly on tests that require keeping track of multiple objects (including socially relevant cues) simultaneously in a large volume (cubic miles) of space, above below and all around. Whales not so good on some human salient tests.
I often think of this difficulty with defining intelligence of whales when discussions turn to the possibilities of intelligent life on other worlds in the universe, or to artificial intelligence … if we cannot manage to recognize, describe, and define intelligence in whales … fellow mammals with brains organized not very dissimilar to ours, then how presumptuous of us to believe we have any chance at even recognizing the existence of intelligence of a more alien sort, be it biologic or machine based.
Talking about the intelligence of whales in general seems about as specific to me as talking about the intelligence of terrestrial mammals. All the examples so far seem to concentrate on the behavior of toothed whales, who are among the predators of the oceans. And predators are generally regarded as more intelligent than herbivores. Baleen whales, OTOH, generally don’t hunt as such. They basically graze, so they can be compared to the herbivores on land. Just as you don’t need to be the Einstein of the terrestrial animals to walk around a field and chew on the grass (with the occasional escape from a predator), you don’t need heaps of reasoning power to swim around with your mouth open to filter small creatures from the salty soup you’re swimming in.
Racist, um, speciesist or not, I definitely believe that intelligence depends on the species. And that discussing the intelligence of “whales” as if they were a homogeneous group of animals is rather meaningless.
This comment would be more credible if you’d written “primates” rather than “terrestrial mammals.”
In fact, however, members of both extant Cetacean suborders are noted for intelligence, e.g. humpback whale in Mysticeti, and dolphins, etc. in Odontoceti.
But is that a difference of degree or of kind? It seems to me to be the former. If humans evolved to live in the oceans, I suspect we’d develop the same skills as whales now have, and vice versa, for the reason that faced with a similar problem–feeding themselves–both have thought up identical strategies to make it easier. Not to mention similar social behaviour like rape and forcing undesirables out of the group. Isn’t that indicative of similar thought processes?
It isn’t necessarily that we can’t understand whales’ intelligence; we just don’t have enough information yet. Thanks to the lack of communication, we get virtually zero feedback from them, and thanks to their foreign environment, we only get fleeting glimpses of their behaviour, so I think the jury is still out on that.
A difference in kind more than degree I think. To bastardize Thomas Nagle: What is it like to be a sperm whale? To some degree we have developed many of the same skills - our skills however have depended on the use of tools to do the information processing for us and to present that information to us in forms we can understand. (That global applied accumulated intelligence of human society is huge and is of course humanity’s great trick; not the intelligence of any of our individual brains.) That of course is not thinking like a whale.
But yes, if we are careful and openminded and collect enough information we might be able to describe cetacean intelligences of forms that are alien to ours. And that process could serve as a model for the possibility of evaluating other alien sorts of intelligences that we might someday encounter, be they artificial or of another world. Seems to me that understanding the sort of intelligence in another set of mammalian brains of similar complexity in a different environment of our same world is a good first problem to try to master.
One major point missed here is just the unbelievable speed with which humans started to apply intelligence. Humans have been around for about 200,000 years. That isn’t jack shit on the scale of time.
Human problem solving ability really only exists on one level: if this, then this. That is the definition of logic and the basis of absolutely everything that we do.
I wonder if whales do the same (it sounds like they do a bit), but hardly have developed the concept as quickly as humans did.
Here’s another thing: human evolution was not inevitable, it was a response to the environment. I would have to wonder if the reason that whales did not develop the same rigor of logical problem solving is because it was never necessary to do so. Whales have never been hunted due to their size, and therefore have no reason to problem solve their way out of that one.
Cetaceans certainly are hunted. Many of the larger whale species are hunted by killer whales, and smaller dolphin and porpoise species are hunted by sharks. So that can’t be the explanation for why cetacean intelligence has developed along different lines from human intelligence.
Perhaps not, but the reason why the intelligentsia are different is not a hard question to answer: because they were cultivated in different environments.
Humans primary problem was to become the ultimate predator in their environment, now we are. It was a balance between physical prowess and mental prowess. As the brain grew larger, women had to have wider hips in order to give birth. This limited women’s mobility, so as a result, babies were born earlier into developmental phase. This led to humans settling in order to raise the more vulnerable babies, and thus small societies were born.
I don’t believe that whales had the same problem, and hence why their intelligence developed in a different way. As a question, do whales have stagnant societies, ones that generally don’t change in members (besides ones dying and born), and in the same location?
Anyway, I’m not sure what the predatory environment was in the sea, but I would imagine that it was a lot more dangerous and diverse in the jungles of Africa. Therefore, human intelligence was the ONLY factor that set humans apart, and it had to be developed rapidly and extremely.
As to the question if whales are more intelligent, I would certainly say yes.
Individual humans may be smarter than individual whales. However if the question is as a species, well consider the fact that humans have been around for only 200,000 years, and we are likely to destroy ourselves in the next 200 if not 100. Whales have been around for millions of years, obviously their intelligence is such that it is not a destructive intelligence, like how humans very quickly became.
Thus, it is a greater intelligence although it may not be better.
I think I’ve let myself get sidetracked from my original question, “Is whale problem-solving intelligence on a par with ours?”, to something more like, “Are their thought processes similar to ours?”, which is admittedly different animal altogether. The ability to make and use tools I suppose gives us a greater intellectual range for problem solving, so I’ll concede that the answer to the question in the OP is No.
As a trivial sidenote, the Wikipedia page on fish traps has this bit about an archaeological site in Australia:
“Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had 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 reason.”
– Douglas Adams
Let’s try it this way:
An alien civilization of a completely alien sort of intelligence comes to this planet maybe 100,000 years ago. Sees a variety of creatures, among them various whales, elephants, ant colonies functioning as superorganisms, and anatomically modern humans well before any behavioral modernity became extant.
By what methods could that civilization decide which of those entities were intelligent and to what degrees? Would it recognize that early humans were intelligent and if so why and how?
And let’s not forget they went undefeated in '72.
mmm
And horseshoe crabs have been around for 300 million years, thus clearly showing intelligence far above whales’.