Sure, to some extent. But no blind human has echolocation as good as a whale’s (or even as good as a bat’s, to keep to something in the same medium). The circuitry just isn’t there. And likewise, no whale is going to be able to develop vision as good as a human’s.
It doesnt need to, if there’s something that whales currently do with their brains that can’t be used in their human body, it would just get “rewired” and that part of the brain is used for another purpose that it would find useful and compensate that way (assuming they’re born with the limitation). So sure they might not process visual information as well, but i don’t think the part of the brain that normally is used for echolocation is going to waste, just repurposed.
I’m thinking the parents would have to find a source for seal meat.
You have inspired me. Here’s an image made in Artbreeder, with some postwork by me.
A human/cetacean hybrid might be semiaquatic, and since orcas are fast, successful predators the result could be quite aggressive and prefer fish (or sealmeat as Saint_Cad suggests).
Maybe the speech centres would be quite different - cetacean language may be (at least partly) based around the different types of sonar returns a cetacean gets when pursuing various prey species. This might make translation a bit difficult.
They would then not be orcas; which makes the question difficult to answer.
I don’t think we currently have any clear idea how much our conscious capabilities are entangled with our ability to use our hands as we do, use our speech as we do, etc. But I very much doubt that that entanglement is zero.
First, you have to define “smart”.
I’m dubious that the only way to define it is “technological progress”.
You have to name it, “Willy”?
Assuming an orca’s brain could fully adapt to a human body, and raising that orca-brained child in human society, would likely result in a human child with a large head who might be a bit smarter or dumber than average. However, I believe a more intriguing experiment would be to test the adaptability of the orca brain, as this is the unknown parameter that makes the experiment interesting.
Orcas possess innate cognitive abilities shaped by their environment and experiences. Observing the development of an orca-brained human child raised in human society could provide insights into the balance between hardwired brain processes and learned behaviors—the classic nature vs. nurture debate.
Orcas demonstrate remarkable intelligence and adaptability. They learn and apply complex hunting tactics, demonstrating their cognitive skills. An orca’s brain is significantly larger than a human’s (5-7 kilograms vs. 1.4 kilograms) and shares similar structures, such as the insula and cingulate sulcus. These areas, highly developed in both orcas and humans, contribute to self-awareness, understanding social relationships, and empathy. Orcas also possess an elaborate paralimbic system with intricate folding, believed to combine emotional processing with higher-level thinking.
Both genetic factors (nature) and environmental influences (nurture) play significant roles in brain function. Understanding the balance between innate abilities and learned behaviors is important. By observing an orca-brained child in human society, we’d gain valuable insights into this interplay.
Studying the adaptability of the orca brain can deepen our understanding of intelligence across species. Instead of assuming a fully adaptable orca brain in a thought experiment, let’s consider a real-life scenario without constraints to see just how adaptable it is. Any volunteers to donate your body? You’ll be a better swimmer and love seafood!
The kid would really, REALLY like sushi.
There is a fundamental misapprehension that the brain is just a computer performing discrete cognition functions that can be divorced from the body. But there are aspects of cognition that occur all over the nervous system. The most obvious example of this is the optic nerve (which is actually an extension of the brain) where a lot of ‘pre-processing’ of visual information occurs, but it is also demonstrably true for the vestibular system, in the intestine (which is the second largest collection of neurons in the body), and in general proprioception. A brain that is sensory deprived will actually hallucinate ‘appropriate’ sensory stimuli because it needs those inputs to function. A brain somehow connected to the nervous system of human body (or a bipedal planform that is highly modified from what it is evolved to experience and control) would not experience the world a way a human does, and would not develop the same cognitive capacities. (Whether it would have similar emotional responses is another question, given how the affective system evolved much earlier and responses in mammals seem to be relatively similar.)
“The brain in infant hood” is quite plastic, naturally, but it is also evolved with innate behaviors and perceptions which refer to under the umbrella term of ‘instinct’. We don’t teach infants how to see, and once they are sufficiently developed somatically they will begin to crawl, pull themselves up, and learn to walk without assistance. A cetacean brain would not have any of these instincts, and we would expect a hominoid cetacean would try to wriggle and roll instead of standing up because it has neither the development framework for either upright locomotion or the vestibular system for the kind of balance a biped requires. And positing ‘genetic engineering’ to modify the cetacean brain to add these functions is begging the question.
There is a teleological assumption here that building structures, using tools, making drawings and written communications, et cetera, are all evident end results of intelligence, but while that has been the evolutionary route of hominids, it is a result of particular selective pressures and adaptations. Orcas and other cetaceans not only do not need “spears, axes, and wooden huts”, they would have no use for them if they were available. Cetaceans are so well adapted (despite originally deriving from land mammals) that they exist in the entire seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface that is not on or surrounded by land, and orcas in particular occupy regions that are at least equal in total area to the land masses. Orcas may be quite intelligent (and I think there is substantial evidence that they are) but not in ways that require tool making or development of something akin to hands.
As for language, I think it is important to understand the evolutionary purpose behind it as a technology. Although it is often assumed to have a primarily social function, it isn’t either necessary or particularly good at mediating social interactions, and indeed, much of our ‘social niceties’ involve non-verbal expressions (body language, facial displays, et cetera). The real function of language is to provide a shared abstraction of natural world (or at least the experience of it by an embodied mind), such that information and perception can be shared by description across disparate space and time. In other words, I can experience some hazard or resource, and then describe it to someone else later or at distance from it, and share that information.
But the underlying assumption is that we have a sufficiently comparable experience of the world such that the mental model in my mind can be abstracted into language that will produce a similar mental model in another mind. As described above, the way cetaceans perceive the world is so different from hominid senses that human-cetacean communication would likely be able to convey the most trivial of concepts. (There are a number of efforts to use heuristic neural networks try to interpret the language capacity for various cetacean species but I suspect while they may find patterns that are indicative of complex semantic content, we will not actually be able to have any deep understanding of the actual meaning.)
So even if we could interpret cetacean ‘language’ it does not follow that we could use it to make highly refined estimates of their intelligence in some quantifiable way. A better evaluation is their problem solving behaviors and capacity for learning, which are unquestionably well developed. Trying to equivalence intelligence to particular end products such as art forms, particularly tools or other manipulative technologies, structures, et cetera that they would have no constructive use for is not a viable or sensible metric.
Stranger
Again, to an extent. But not completely. I mean, compare the other great apes: They have all the same physical advantages as us, but they still can’t really learn language. And yes, I know that some apes can sign, but only in a very rudimentary way: All of the deep thoughts you’ve seen attributed to them had to be very heavily “interpreted” by their human handlers.
Whales are far more distantly related to us than chimps or gorillas are, and so their language centers (if any) must also be more different from ours. Maybe they can adapt to a rudimentary form of human language (after all, some birds, which are even more distantly related and even more alien to us, can), but maybe not.
What do you think happens when we put a baby orca brain in a baby human body?
Arrested and convicted of Murder in most states.
I would not breast feed it.
Die.
When we put a baby orca brain in a baby human body, it dies.
It certainly wouldn’t be able to control the human autonomic nervous system correctly, and would otherwise be physiologically incompatible in a vast number of ways. But the conceit of question was to ignore those kinds of fundamental problems and focus on the experience that the orca brain would have in the body of the human baby, and whether it would develop human-like intelligence.
Stranger
Comic books have imagined far more ridiculous chimeras of humans and animals (and inanimate objects) and asked what would happen when.
Unfortunately, the answers they come up with are deliberately designed to be as ridiculous as the concepts originally were.
We can cash in. Many potential new comic books are being birthed in this thread. What If? as a title is already taken, but I think The Straight Dope presents “What Do You Think Happens?” comics have great potential with AI-generated images.
All revenues go to keeping the server alive.
But I can confirm, having watched the award-winning documentary Poor Things, that you can definitely transplant a goat’s brain into a human! 
Yeah, I think that’s what this question boils down to:
If you made an exact functional replica of a human brain out of Orca-brain-meat, what would it do in a human infant body? Pretty much what a normal human brain does, because it would be an exact functional replica. Not an interesting or profound question really. More or less tautological.
If you just found a way to hook up an otherwise-unmodified orca brain to a human infant body, it would be able to do some things and would likely struggle with others, because the adaptability of brains is not unlimited (nature has no reason to go to the trouble of making a brain with unlimited adaptibility to its container, because the containers are generally consistent from one generation to the next - limited adaptability is enough).
It’s a weird quirk of how we perceive individuals, but the movie frames this as a punishment for the human when in fact it’s really a punishment for an innocent goat.
I think it would go on a killing spree, avenging the deaths of its fellow Orcas. And it would make lame quips, like “I got yer killer whale right here” and it bites their heads off.