Whale brains are not just larger than human brains. There are several species where the brains are more complex. The complexity and density of folding, something we associate with higher intelligence, are higher than human brains, and the areas of the brain associated with emotional intelligence are bigger relative to the rest of the brain. Just search images of whale brains compared to human brains. We are literally smooth brained compared to them. The deep folding of dolphins and orcas, for example, are very interesting.
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 unclear why the "density of folding" would be associated with "higher 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 is unclear why the "density of folding" would be associated with "higher intelligence".
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.
> Abnormal cortical folding has been associated with severe neurological, cognitive and behavioural disorders, such as epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia.
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
Go argue with neurobiologists and published papers then. I read several abstracts before posting my comment. Further, cognitive function lies in the domain of neurobiology, not psychology.
How does a whale have a “deeper social relationship” than I do with my wife, son, best friend, colleagues, etc. really, I’d like to know what you mean by this in exact terms.
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?
I honestly don't get the brain-to-body size argument. Why should a larger organism need more brain size to control his larger body?
A large engine often do not require more inputs than a small one and I don't understand why this shouldn't also be the case for organs.
Because the engine analogy though intuitively appealing, doesn't accurately map onto the way organisms work. The 'nerves' which send control and sensory information to and from our organs are neurons. The 'extended brain' includes the central and peripheral nervous systems, and takes part in local and distributed cognition. So it's not a case of an engine running a machine, or a CPU controlling the information flowing from a bunch of subsystems. The neurocognitive architecture is spread across the body. Naturally more cerebral cortex is needed to perform higher order processing and control the signalling throughout the whales enormous nervous system.
I think a simpler way to put it is that the coordination of more body mass requires more analog input. It's not the case that a large muscle group in a body is sufficiently abstracted into something that only requires a small amount of input to do work. It makes intuitive sense to me that it requires more signal bandwidth to control more muscle cells at once, and in turn more computation to produce data that requires such bandwidth.
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.
Nature doesn't optimize like us. If the neuron count is function of tissue 'mass' then you'll have a larger brain. Just having larger skin surface (granted similar density of sensory cells) would be a reason to have more neuron to deal with more sensory inputs.
I know, I mentioned "like us", there are optimizations, just not necessarily the same as the one we'd put in place.
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 :)
Your statement already fails at the engine-brain analogy. Furthermore the brain controls muscle fibers. More and larger muscles means more muscle fibers to be connected to the brain. Also brain size and body mass simply correlate. [1]
I think its correlation vs causation kind of. Brain-to-body size how important the brain is for the animal. A big animal can have a big brain, because why not. But for a small animal to have a big brain it means a certain sacrifice. This shows how much emphasis evolution has put on the brain. More emphasis leads to bigger brains, but more importantly to smarter wiring.
> Rather than 90 percent of this man's brain being missing, it's more likely that it's simply been compressed into the thin layer you can see in the images above.
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.
> 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.
Their body is far more than a factor of 7.4 larger than ours. Accounting for most of the brain being IO wiring, and the fact that they mostly just have to swim with their mouth open to survive, there's no reason to believe whales are particularly smart nor that anything particularly novel / intelligent happens inside that big brain.
They process sonar information in a visual way, and communicate it long distance. When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?
>They process sonar information in a visual way
Which is certainly no harder than processing stero vision or stero sound, as pretty much every species with either two eyes or two ears does.
>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.
>You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO!
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.
>Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating.
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?
I like to invite you to close your eyes and walk through your flat only using click sounds (link). Works surprising well, right? Now add some 50 million years on evolution on top, realise how good water transports sound and put some overtones on that 20hz base frequency.
bats can do it with much smaller brains, and coordinate flying at the same time. there's no reason to think you need massive complicated brains to do it.
I'm not confusing anything. The comment I'm replying to states "When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?". Well, irrespective of what whales actually understand of their 3d environment based on echolocation, they are certainly not "putting that 3d image in another whales mind just by yelling it." The bandwidth of their communication channel is to small for that. At best, they might be encoding driving directions to krill and/or mates.
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.
That's a very odd way to consider how whales live. They form social groups, communicate with each other, navigate and migrate, avoid and fight predators, and so on.
You can add humans to that list, yet we consider ourselves much more sophisticated than these animals you mention. We recognize in whales some of the traits that we believe make us different.
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.
Life span has nothing to do with that. Life span is all about economies of scale of the organism. The larger the organism the more efficient it is. The heart rate is slower etc. There are exceptions in animal kingdom, of course. For detailed scientific overview on this specific topic, I highly recommend this book: The Scale by Geoffrey West
I wasn't suggesting that the longer lifespan was a result of higher cognitive functions but rather the opposite. Living longer enables individuals to travel further and face a greater variety of situations which require more sophisticated methods of analysis and transmission to be transmitted to others in the herd / offspring.
I think the assumption there was that brain size is proportional to the quantity of sensory inputs. sense of touch scales with the body surface which scales with the square of the animal size while body mass scales with the cube of the size.
Other sensory input scales with the complexity of the organ; e.g. for the eye the number of photoreceptors
Try reading Moby Dick knowing what we know now about these cousins of ours - there are moments of too brutal treatment. And it's practically a non-fiction book aside from the side- drama.
I read "Etchings of a Whaling Cruise" years ago and it was gruesome enough to really stick with me. It's the accounts of a Yankee whaler in the 1800's, which Melville used it as a reference to write Moby Dick.
Except that's not precisely what the bible says, at least not exclusively. The bible is a big, heterogeneous book, you can find a bit of everything in it, and there are passages that specifically say that it's our responsibility to take care of nature and that we should treat our animals with kindness.
Proverbs 12:10 ESV / 26: "Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beasts".
> The bible is a big, heterogeneous book, you can find a bit of everything in it
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.
I won't judge you or your comment but I have to say as a rationalist(?) and atheist, it seems very odd to suggest the natural world would be a kind place if we were less destructive to it. By kind I mean non-infectious, non-aggressive, non-carnivorous etc. (as I read you anyway)
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.
The Bible does say we were supposed to live in an idyllic garden, Eden, before Adam's first sin. All the animals were tame, and will be tame again. Now I tend to take the Bible literally, but the important thing is that this story indicates how desperately fallen we are. It points to our need for a savior, Jesus -- who is God, because only God could get the job done.
We couldn't be further apart in many ways, but in being 'fallen' from what we could have been... yeah, we're strangely indistinguishable. Thanks for your reply, it's appreciated.
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.”
Are you interpreting "dominion" in the worst possible way? A King has dominion over his subjects and yet we'd say he is a bad king of he treated them harshly. Why should having dominion over animals mean anything more than caring for them?
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.
In a barely literate pre-industrial culture, yes, dominion = abuse. I know firsthand how peasants treat animals, and if you went to a country in poverty you'd see it too.
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".
> In a barely literate pre-industrial culture, yes, dominion = abuse.
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._
Calling it cynical is a cheap way to dismiss it, and my experience of seeing it first hand. Well done.
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. "
"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"
You seem to be the one not arguing in good faith. You quote from the Bible to prove your point, and then immediately dismiss counter-quotes by questioning the authorship of the book you originally quoted yourself.
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.
Yes to this... There is a chapter called "The Whiteness of the Whale" - this is a very haunting essay on circumstances when the color white produces dread, instead of being a symbol of purity. For example - [1] Just the long list of symbolisms for whiteness is a bit astounding.
I don't think big-brains mean much without a sufficiently high-level language.
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.
“It is the year 8000. Humanity has joined a vast universal republic along with tens of thousands of alien worlds. All worlds agree on one thing: the search for intelligent life still continues.”
Yup, about 23 hundred, which is the time it takes the entire ocean to completely evaporate and be entirely replaced. You know the old saying, you can't step into the same ocean twice in 2300 years. If you ever wondered, that's what it means.
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.