17 thoughts on “Nurture, Not Nature”

  1. Might that qualify as first contact?

    Have bushmen ever had contact with dolphins I wonder? Might they be better able to perceive some pattern in all the clicks and whistles?

    INTJ, natures brainstorming alien visitors.

  2. “Fish there!”
    “Fish where?”
    “Fish there!”
    “Where are you?”
    “I’m here! Where are you”
    “Here! Where are fish?”
    “Fish here!”
    “Look there! Dolphiness!”
    “She looks a goer!”
    “Mine!”
    “No Mine!”
    “Wanna make sumink of it pal!”
    “Mine!”
    “I’m bigger than you!”
    “Take that shortie”
    “OK pal, you win”
    “Where fish!”
    “Fish there!”

  3. I dunno. We tool-users don’t usually think much of “culture” that doesn’t involve artifacts. I mean, maybe the dolphins have great eddas or something, passed down from generation to generation. But why?

    There’s a common thread among thoughts about nonhuman intelligences, including both ET and the whales, and that is that a certain level of intelligence necessitates a form of conscious mind to which we can relate. I find that unlikely. I think the type of mind is probably more important than its raw problem-solving abilities. (Otherwise, Pentium Core Duos would start to seem strangely more and more human as their clock speed increased.)

    Arguably, the type of mind that seems “human” to us is a mind that is somewhat childishly plastic — fond of learning new things, experiencing new sensations, taking chances, communicating the results of new experiences and new thoughts to others, and so forth.

    But it’s hard to argue that that type of mind would originate or persist in any species that isn’t a tool-user. Why devote huge amounts of your resources to being a very flexible appreciater and user of your environment, unless your survival depends critically on your ability to use bits of the environment — that is, you’re a tool user?

  4. The majority of any animal’s brainpower, (including ours), is devoted to the four Fs.

    That is, when confronted with something outside it’s experience the animal has to decide “Do I Fight it, Fornicate with it, Feast on it or Flee it.”

    So language, especially among social animals, is pretty much going to reflect those choices. The rest of language is about “Clear off, this is mine.”

    What would impress me about dolphin language would be “Hey, see those fish? You go round that side, he goes round this side, she goes round the back and I’ll come from the front. The we’ll really feast ’em.”

    I know this behavior occurs in animals, including cetaceans, but if they talk about it, rather than do it by instinct or learn by example, that would be massive.

  5. Kevin: So your opinion is that speech began as battle language? If so, the thought is depressing – but you’re probably right.

    This is far from original; but speech – and by extension writing – is probably the reason why we are the most lethally efficient predators ever seen. Unfortunately, because our species has no natural weapons and therefore no inhibitions against combat, and because we use weapons by instinct – that might be the evolutionary downside of intelligence.

    About dolphins; humanity has been looking for someone else to talk to for millennia. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we found out that the aliens we seek have been right under our noses all this time?

  6. Hmmmm.

    Personally I wonder if their brains aren’t wired better for communicating through sound and music.

    Anybody remember the movie “Big” with Tom Hanks? The large electronic piano that you played by stepping on the keys?

    A large electronic piano that is draped along the wall of a pool that could be played by a dolphin snout would be a very interesting thing. If they played recognizable patterns or even repeated patterns would be interesting.

    And if dolphins isolated from the piano ,but who have mixed with dolphins who played with it, could pick it up quickly. Well that says a lot there.

  7. “”We can’t for the life of us work out why they do it,” said Mike Bossley from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS)”

    They do it because they can (just as humans tend to do things because they can).
    They probably do it because it’s fun to do something new (again like humans).
    They might do it because they might in some form recognize it as simple basic cross-species communication: pay attention.

    Maybe even David Brin has underestimated dolphins and other animals (i.e. not really any need for Uplift), that should make both him and a lot of others happy ^_^

  8. Even if that were true, Kevin B., it doesn’t seem relevant. I suggest you are arbitrarily equating proportions, like the people who say because 51% of the population is female, it follows that, absent sexist prejudice, 51% of every conceivable sorting of people (by careers, by earnings, by marital status, by choice in footwear) must be female.

    You would at least need to argue that language is some inherent and inseparable part of intelligence, and that therefore the functions of language reflect the functions of intelligence. But that can’t be true, as there are roughly equivalently intelligent species (birds and mice) which differ radically in how noisy they are. Some species which are quite stupid (bees) nevertheless have fairly sophisticated language, and others that are pretty damn smart (rats) hardly make a sound.

    It seems more likely, therefore, that the functions of language are distinct from the functions of intelligence, and lie more with the degree to which social interaction governs the success of the species. Clearly, in humans, social interaction is almost paramount in our survival (cf. the usual observation about the expected survival time of a naked lone human deposited in the wilderness).

    I know this [coordinated hunting] behavior occurs in animals, including cetaceans, but if they talk about it, rather than do it by instinct or learn by example, that would be massive.

    I think we should be more imaginative. Coordinating the actions of a pack with some kind of communication is something many species do. This is not very exciting. What makes human speech truly novel is not that we convey real information to each other, but that we convey not real — imaginary — information to each other.

    Quite a number of animals can say see that prey? you go this way, and I’ll go that and we’ll trap ’em. So far as we know, only humans can convey remember when we saw that prey yesterday, and you went this way and I went that, and it didn’t work out? Today, if we see some prey, let’s try it a different way, as follows…

    It’s our ability to convey entire imaginary worlds to each other, in which we explore the various ways in which things might be, but are not yet, which makes us different. Do dolphins do this? They might, but I’m not sure why it would be useful. A powerful ability to imagine the world different from it is seems less useful when you are mostly only capable of responding to the world — when you can’t remake it to better suit you.

  9. Maybe we can can discuss philosophy with dolphins if they are capable of high-level abstract thought, that could be useful or at least very entertaining.

    Hopefully their ultimate philosophy would be something other than “So long and thanks for all the fish” 🙂

  10. only humans can convey remember when…

    Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but only humans beyond a certain age can convey remember when. It’s part of the development process (I’m not sure what age.)

    Also, animals do imagine, at least they dream. I’ve seen many dogs acting something out while asleep.

    Don’t know what it all means, or how it fits together, but it is interesting.

  11. “But it’s hard to argue that that type of mind would originate or persist in any species that isn’t a tool-user. Why devote huge amounts of your resources to being a very flexible appreciater and user of your environment, unless your survival depends critically on your ability to use bits of the environment — that is, you’re a tool user?”

    Aside from the fact that limited tool use *has* been observed in dolphins:

    http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050606_dolphinfrm.htm

    http://www.animalintelligence.org/2007/05/08/dolphins-learn-tool-use-from-parents/

    And ‘cultural transmission’ of behavior in orcas (which are also dolphins, but of the 50 species in the delphinade, this will be mostly about the familiar Atlantic Bottlenosed Dolphin):

    http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/6502/title/Getting_the_Gull_Baiting_trick_spreads_among_killer_whales

    Dolphins are also carivores who live in a fairly dynamic (shelter? come now.) three-dimensional environment (with the added requirement of always needing to be aware of where the surface is, and gaining frequent access to it for breathing) on a 24/7 basis (they can’t sleep for signifigant continuous periods as land mammals can), armed (literally, as their pulses can stun some prey) with an effective echolocation capability (and yet seemingly as visually capable as we are, including color perception). Combine this with cooperation with other individuals (and the social
    interacions that tend to come with that) that also enhance individual and group survival (e.g. ‘hunting’).

    Seems to me it would indeed take a large, complex brain, capable of some very generalized processing (humans didn’t specifically evolve the ability to do General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics for example, but our capability *is* broad and general enough to encompass it, regardless [at least to the extent that *anyone* understands that part of physics!]) to drive all that.

    I submit that, while it definitely helps to posess decent opposable manipulative organs to begin with (and octopi, squid and cuttlefish might see humans as rather limited in that respect), the capacity to make/use tools within the limits of one’s physiology (and perhaps have, or at least be potentially capable of abstract language) is a natural outcome of having such a brain.

    IOW, there’s plenty for some species to think about (and many ways to be “a very flexible appreciater and user of your environment”) besides tools (or GR/QM), but the ability to *do* that kind of thinking, can come to *include* tools (or GR/QM).

    Now, it may (or may not) be that there are kinds of ‘thinking’ that even human brains are utterly incapable of (Kasparov noted an unusual ‘feel’ to the way Deep Blue played chess, compared to human opponents. Maybe that’s a hint.), but we’re still flexible enough to at least realize and consider the possibility. Perhaps advances in AI and/or an ET contact, will give us more insight there…or we’ll have to wait until a post-Singularity time (if such a thing, as currently visualized, actually comes to pass) to actually ‘get it.’

  12. I’ve speculated that if dolphins speak, many of their words would be based on echo location returns. Something we might understand if we applied the right tools to look for it.

  13. Frank, the point was whether, if dolphins communicate, they do so in a way that we would recognize as “like us” enough to be interesting. We could certainly learn to “talk” to bees (build little bee robots, program them to waggle in the right ways), but — who would bother? They have nothing to say that would interest us.

    My guess is that the quality of communication that fascinates us is the endless exchange of imaginary worlds, of what might be but isn’t yet. We are all, metaphorically speaking, MUD servers for each other, and this is what we find most fascinating about conversation. It’s not just relating fact to each other, nor is it very often concrete tactical planning sessions. It’s the big grand what-if stuff — politics, big future plans, philosophy o’ life, et cetera.

    And my point is that unless you extensively modify your environment to suit you — and humans clearly do, notice all our cities and such, while dolphins clearly do not — then it’s not clear why, from an evolution point of view, you would find it efficient to devote such a huge amount of brainpower to this very complex medium of communication in which you convey so much fantasy information.

    I am not making a general argument about the intelligence of dolphins. They may be smarter than us, for all I know, for certain definitions of the word “smart.”

  14. “And my point is that unless you extensively modify your environment to suit you — and humans clearly do, notice all our cities and such, while dolphins clearly do not — then it’s not clear why, from an evolution point of view, you would find it efficient to devote such a huge amount of brainpower to this very complex medium of communication in which you convey so much fantasy information.”

    I understand. I suppose the question is, how far back do we go before seeing a signifigant difference in the human brain, compared to today, and how much in the way of ‘modifying our enviornment’ were we doing at that time?

    What you suggest seems a chicken/egg matter to me. Evolution doesn’t ‘forsee’ tool use and the influence on environement it gives.

    But other demands may drive brain development in directions that also *happen* to lend themselves to tool use (and other things).

    And it helps to have hands, or something like them, with opposable appendages. A clear necessity for non-flying tree-dwellers, as is good depth perception, which also happen to lend themselves to tool creation and use.

    Though I will readily acknowledge that once tool use does appear, the advantage it confers can (at least in out case) very quickly drive a species in the direction of being a *more* effective and creative tool user.

    Perhaps (and possibly for reasons as much, if not more, physiological as intellectual) one only occasionally sees such things among dolphins because, for them, the advantage isn’t as great as it is for primates.

    No hands, no fire = no signifigant influence on your environment, no matter how smart and adaptable other evolutionary pressures have made you.

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