From this morning’s (Monday’s) paper: link
I promise I am not one of the people who just don’t want to believe dophins aren’t smart, but I find this part odd:
[COLOR=Blue]"You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don’t put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish will eventually jump out.
“But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water between the different pools.”
Why not? Because, Professor Manger says, the thought would simply not cross their minds. [/COLOR]
I have never had a lid on my goldfish bowl, and it never jumped out. And if it did try to jump out, I wouldn’t see that as a sign of intelligence, in fact it would be quite stupid to leave its nice bowl.
So perhaps dolphins aren’t stupid for not wanting to jump their dividers. Perhaps they are content, see no reason to risk venturing into another pool.
I think it is quite possible that dolphins aren’t as smart as earlier claimed, I just don’t see this article making much of a case for the change in attitude.
When a goldfish jumps out of its bowl, the result is always death. (Unless they’re lucky enough to do it when a person is around.) I can’t really see that as a sign of intelligence.
Despair, perhaps.
Hard to figure.
Dolphins may very well be intelligent. But that intelligence would very very strange to us. Flipper may be the closest we get in my life to ET. It has been suggested that dolphins are hard-wired to not jump over dividers. The potential for jumping out of the water by mistake could explain this behavior.
Or, perhaps, dolphins are not too bright. We may have been projecting onto them.
It is often useful to turn What Everyone Knows on its head. I would like to see someone look into dolphin intelligence in an effort to disprove it.
Let’s then train goldfish to locate and tag underwater mines. Care and feeding of little fishys would be a heck of a lot cheaper than it is for bottlenose a couple of meters long.
Dolphins aren’t that smart. In college, I was sleeping with this dolphin’s wife for like four months and he never figured it out. Hah! Sucker!
{MST3K Mode}Oh, man, the Dolphin Warship is going to kick this guy’s ass!!! {/MST3K Mode}
I saw a pigeon take off from the roof of a building today and fly away. Apparently it has never occurred to Professor Paul Manger to try jumping off the roof of a building. Conclusion; Professor Manger if less intelligent than a pigeon.
A few years ago, some guy decided dogs were smarter than cats, because when he put a towel over his dog’s head, the dog would shake it off, but when he put a towel over his cat, it went to sleep. He concluded that getting out from under the towel was the most desirable outcome, so therefore, cats were stupid.
A single observation is an unreliable gauge of intelligence, IMO.
Dolphins are pretty stupid living in igloos and such.
No, no… he was prejudiced that getting out from under the towel was the most desirable outcome, but the cats knew it wasn’t. I know many humans who would love any excuse to go back to sleep. That doesn’t make humans particularly intelligent, or course…
Dolphins jumped their way out of the Super Bowl.
Does that make’m smart again?
What’s with this news source? There may well be evidence, or arguments, that dolphins aren’t particularly smart–but the only arguments that appear in this article are laughably stupid. Are they just yanking chains?
Daniel
So then what was Flipper? Epileptic?
Debunked:
I am happy to see in the link that the Scientist in questions sounds dumber than the average Fundie arguing about dinosaurs.
Jim
Those are porpoises.
Seriously, chimps aren’t thinking about, and reacting to you and other things in their environments? This guy is gonna end up working for The Fin in Reno, Nevada.
That’s pretty important. From another news report on the same thing:
Of course, that must be false, since it was published by Al-Jazeera.
You see, he never started banging the rocks together.