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In the Mind of a Whale: Can we make sense of the biggest brains on the planet?
- telesilla 4y agoTry 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.
- Aromasin 4y agoI 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.
- zasdffaa 4y agoAIUI the western view of animals was via the bible, of resources provided to us by god, a gift to humanity; there to be used however we wanted.
- jbotz 4y agoExcept 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".
- zasdffaa 4y agoOkay, sounds like you know your stuff, but yet 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.
- Thorentis 4y agoAre 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.
- zasdffaa 4y agoIn 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".
- cfiggers 4y ago> 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._
- marcinreal 4y ago> 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.
- zasdffaa 4y agoI 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. Curious for your response, if any.
- marcinreal 4y agoThe 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.
- zasdffaa 4y agoWe 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.
- DFHippie 4y agoHe also used as a reference the five years he spent at sea, sometimes on whaling ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville#1839%E2%80%931844:_Years_at_sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville#1839%E2%80%931...
- sn41 4y agoYes 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. [1] https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/42-the-whiteness-of-the-whale https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-...
- tromp 4y agoJust comparing size: > 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.
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- IIAOPSW 4y agoTheir 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.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoThey 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?
- 2wrist 4y agoThis made me smile, and laugh, and smile some more. :-)
- IIAOPSW 4y ago>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.
- Silverback_VII 4y agoI 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.
- dbspin 4y agoBecause 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.
- dchftcs 4y agoI 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.
- agumonkey 4y agoNature 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.
- ghosty141 4y agoReally interesting read! Its crazy that one of the greatest mysteries of life live right inside our head.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoOceans have been around for hundreds of years, but we still don't know much about them.
- thwoeri23i4234 4y ago... and thank god for that. Imagine the horrors the humans would do to it if they did.
- yieldcrv 4y agohundreds wow
- Maursault 4y agoYup, 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.
- thwoeri23i4234 4y agoI 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.
- Pulcinella 4y ago“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.”
- bmitc 4y agoWhale 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.
- curious_cat_163 4y agoIt 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.
- bmitc 4y ago> 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.
- koheripbal 4y agoThe theory that higher surface area correlates to higher intelligence is just a theory.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> 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