In the Mind of a Whale: Can we make sense of the biggest brains on the planet?
hakaimagazine.com
hakaimagazine.com
Whale intelligence is different than primate intelligence, and whales clearly demonstrate much deeper social relations than humans. I think we deeply underestimate the intelligence of whales, misjudging their intelligence because of their lack of technology development, explicitly due to their environs and lack of opposable thumbs and not their intelligence.
It is also unclear what scale is the "high" and "low" being measured on. Is it evolutionary "fitness"? If so, what is the point of comparing primates with whales? Their environments are completely different and they have clearly evolved different means to gather energy and sustain their lives.
It’s because it’s a known fact of science. It is called cortical folding or gyrification. Higher folding increases the surface area within the same volume and increases cognitive function.
So you either accept that “fact”, or move the goal post backwards to limiting brain folding to cognitive function hypothesis to just humans like that quote was about as well
verifiable topological fact
> and increases cognitive function.
unverifiable psychological hypothesis (all three terms are weakly and inconsistently defined)
I do agree that whales are probably smarter than we’d expect and if they had thumbs and lived in a desert like we do they’d probably have made some contraptions by now but how are you claiming their relationships are deeper?
A better analogy would then be saying that we need to treat cell groups of a certain mass roughly as one software application that has a certain level of computational resource requirements. The more such applications you have in your system, the more CPU and RAM you need to run them all.
Another way to explain it is that an engine is a autonomous unit that has a specific function, and all you have to do is to instruct it, say, to run with higher or lower power. But most of the body has to be centrally controlled by the brain.
This makes some sense. However nature certainly does optimize as you can see with the sensory resolution from your hand vs the one from your back.
ps: note that I'm not knowledgeable about the topic, I'm just picturing an easy coupling between more cells and more neurons. It might be a totally different reason, maybe whales have a different metabolysm / development causing more brain mass for unrelated reasons :)
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...
I.e. whale brains could certainly be compressed more efficiently, but on the other hand, in a body the size of a whale, that probably doesn’t matter much.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio#...
> The human brain is about 1,350 grams, three times larger than our big-brained relative, the chimpanzee. A sperm whale or killer whale brain can be 10 kilograms.
>When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?
You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO!
Given the bandwidth of 20 hz whale sounds, its preposterous to imagine them containing a more sophisticated depiction of things than that.
Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating.
If you're skeptical about the communication that's one thing, but the thing you're offering is a substitute is not remotely equivalent.
My understanding is that whales can interpret echoes of their own signals and read them as a map of physical features around them, and can exchange these signals with each other.
Linguistic abstraction is a different type of thing altogether, and I don't know what point would served by going up to whales and telling them that they "don't need" the form of communication they actually use.
The comment I was replying to said
>When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?
To which I say this is preposterous because the amount of data that could possibly fit inside of whale calls is orders of magnitude smaller than the data it would take to make a 3d image of a swarm of krill. Whatever it is they are saying, it must be a significantly compressed reduction, perhaps similar to the "map" that is communicated when you ask a stranger on the corner how to get somewhere. Why should one whale take the time transmit a literal 3d terrain map for another whale when mere driving instructions would suffice?
Yes, it's 3D point cloud precision.
(Source: I study echolocation in bats, and many of the classic texts cover echolocation in cetaceans as well.)
Therefore the comment I was replying to was obviously and absurdly generous in its interpretation of whale brain capabilities. Even believing they do point cloud echolocation is a bit generous considering what whales actually need to accomplish. A low resolution 3d blob cloud (in contrast to point cloud) would be all the comprehension of the world they might ever need.
Unlike bats, whales don't have to track down and catch the krill after reaching them.
Really? How do we know? What does in a visual way even mean when it’s not eyes?
https://www.sott.net/article/407359-Dolphin-sounds-generate-...
Took me a bit to find this, google, brave search and bing are worthless. Had to use a work-around to find the exact title, and search for that.
> "Nothing to do with man" - Astrophysicist says climate-cultists "are on a gravy train" to make money
I dunno about the credibility of this site.
Just below the article are the references:
1] http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/breakingnews.html
[2] http://www.speakdolphin.com/pressRelease/Press_Release_3D_Pr...
[3] https://conceptualrevolutions.com/2014/06/06/qa-with-gerald-...
Not a lot of grams needed for that.
Having a longer lifespan might explain the higher nurture/nature ratio. Cats and dogs don't live long enough to develop complex background stories that require abstract language to be transmitted to their children.
(a) Whales have big brains, whales use them for complex behaviour.
(b) Brain size is relatively unrelated to complex behaviour.
Kinda "a dog has four legs, a dog uses its legs to run" vs "number of legs unrelated to running ability, my kitchen table isn't running anywhere".
Other sensory input scales with the complexity of the organ; e.g. for the eye the number of photoreceptors
It seems reasonable that whale skin evolution wouldn't spend energy differentiating between two touches six inches apart.
volume brain ~= volume body ^ (2/3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93body_mass_ratio (in the graphic, dolphins are almost in the same line with a slope of 2/3 than us, but whales are lower)
Proverbs 12:10 ESV / 26: "Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beasts".
Genesis 9:2-3 - The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.
Genesis 1:26-28 - Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
I understand what you're saying though.
I realise it's open to interpretation, but so is the entire Bible. I don't really think the passage you quoted can be taken a single way.
And it is explicit in one quote
Genesis 9:2-3 - The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.
Everything in dread of mankind (ok, 'dread' may have changed its meaning a bit), and - explicitly - "shall be food for you". Again: "food".
That's a pretty cynical interpretation.
You may know that the book of Genesis was not originally written in English. The Hebrew word that is sometimes translated "dominion" in Genesis 1 is the word וּרְד֞וּ (root verb רדה), which simply means "to be king/queen over." It does not connote abuse at all. But here, let me prove that.
The same word appears in the Hebrew Law:
Leviticus 25:43 - "Do not >rule< over them ruthlessly, but fear your God."
If the word רדה automatically connotes abuse, then this is a nonsensical command. "Do not _abuse_ them abusively"...? No. רדה just means "have royal rule over." It can be done "ruthlessly," or it can be done in a way that "fear[s] your God."
Genesis and Leviticus were written by the same primary author (Moses) in the same couple-decade span of time. A single person's lifespan is not enough time for radical vocabulary shift in an ancient context (remember, ancient cultures did not change as fast as ours—their language could remain relatively stable over hundreds of years, as proven by hundreds of ancient documents).
> Everything in dread of mankind (ok, 'dread' may have changed its meaning a bit), and - explicitly - "shall be food for you". Again: "food".
"Dread" just describes the default reaction of animals to humans. When was the last time a squirrel came up to you just to hang out? Undomesticated animals run away from humans, that's all that means. That does not at all connote a Scriptural authorization to exploit nature with reckless abandon, which seems to be the high-level position you're arguing for.
And in a society without the capacity for industrial scale murder farms like we have, mere authorization to _eat_ animals (you say twice—"food") does not suggest at all divine permission to _drive entire species to extinction._
Animals there are predominantly seen food and organic machinery (and in the case of stray cats/dogs, pests).
> Genesis and Leviticus were written by the same primary author (Moses)
"Scholars generally agree that it [Book of Leviticus] developed over a long period of time, reaching its present form during the Persian Period, from 538–332 BC. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Leviticus
"Tradition credits Moses as the author of Genesis, as well as the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and most of Deuteronomy; however, modern scholars, especially from the 19th century onward, place the books' authorship in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, hundreds of years after Moses is supposed to have lived"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis
> does not suggest at all divine permission to _drive entire species to extinction._
I said food, not extinction.
You are not arguing in good faith. Let's stop here.
The thing with interpretation is: anybody can do it. If the claim you're trying to make is using a passage that is open to interpretation, I would question how solid a claim it is.
So, bring on the beetle soup!
Concerning the animal question, the Bible is clear and consistent: mankind was supposed to faithfully steward God's creation and all that lives in it. Man has utterly failed, which is why you can't even go in the woods without getting 20 ticks, and practically every plant you find is invasive and not good for food. The present Earth is falling apart, due to man's imperfect sin nature.
The confusion in this discussion arises from a conflation of mainstream Republican thought with what the Bible actually says.
Edit: "God destroys those who destroy the earth." ~ Revelation 11:18. We see a consistent message from the beginning of the Bible (Genesis) to the end.
Another way, I don't see that the lion would lie down with the lamb in any circumstances. I don't dispute that we're destroying the world, just questioning that in the absence of said destruction we would be in an eden where they, lion and lamb, would.
Curious for your response, if any.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville#1839%E2%80%931...
[1] https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-...
Indeed, if you don't get into the valley where this can evolve, you're bound to remain not more than an animal.
Of course, with language, comes the problem that people with the consciousness of gnats begin to think much too highly of themselves. Mayhaps, we have made a mistake.