4 years ago by ramblerman
The idea of whale intelligence is super interesting and I hope we do more to understand it. But the unfortunate pseudo-scientific need for the author to push the culture/religion angle becomes almost political at times, and seems like a stretch.
We should be able to determine intelligence/communication first without antromorphizing the notion of culture.
Some quotes from this article, and another linked by the author [1]
> Bound by communality, sperm-whale culture expresses a collective individuality: “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”. If that isn’t a lesson for their Homo sapiens cousins, I don’t know what is.
> Whales and dolphins observe rituals of the dead and exhibit grief. Could they, then, express spiritual sentiment, founded on values and belief – even a sense of religion?
> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us.
> Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/cultural-lives...
4 years ago by GoblinSlayer
FWIW humans do know a collectivist morality - Confucianism, and, well, it has its own failure modes.
4 years ago by WalterBright
> Bound by communality, sperm-whale culture expresses a collective individuality: “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”. If that isn’t a lesson for their Homo sapiens cousins, I don’t know what is.
For better or worse, people are individuals, not members of a collective. Collectives of people don't work, and it isn't for a lack of trying. People aren't whales or bees in a beehive.
That doesn't mean, however, that people can't organize. Under free markets, people organize well and effectively, but they still organize based on self interest, not self sacrifice.
4 years ago by smolder
I'm not sure where you are drawing the line between organization and collective. I don't think there is such a clear separation, or much of a distinction at all. When I get a job at a company, yes I'm doing it in self interest, but I still make sacrifices to that group as part of my participation. Is it an ability to come and go independently and form or be part of different organizations that you think makes those non-collectives?
My counter to that is that free markets allow for all sorts of coercion by organizations that harms individual freedom and prevents new organizations from succeeding. You get a join-us-or-lose situation, as you can see playing out with hyper-consolidation of various industries.
Your premise that free markets translate into individual freedoms is limited to those freedoms that dominant organizations can't directly coerce you out of exercising or lobby/collude to take away from you.
4 years ago by WalterBright
Let me put it another way. In a free market, any group is free to start a commune. In America, many thousands have been created.
They all failed.
People try it. After a few months, within a couple years, they tire of it and leave, and the commune collapses.
What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.
4 years ago by coldtea
>For better or worse, people are individuals, not members of a collective.
Huh? There might be a few "individuals" living individually in the history of the world. Isolated from the world, forgotten in some jungle, retreated to some cabin in Alaska, or so.
Some not by choice (e.g. due to some accident with their boat or something), others by choice but only after they've first been raised and prepared by living in communities.
The huge majority has always been members of communities and collective entities.
Without living together with others, collaborating with them, inheriting traditions and knowledge from the past, you don't even have language, culture, science, or anything, not even a cuisine. You're like some animal...
>Collectives of people don't work, and it isn't for a lack of trying
Between famillies, villages, cities, companies, churches, armies, nations, and so on, I can't even think what you had in mind as "not working"...
4 years ago by WalterBright
I explicitly said that people still organize. Not as collectives, though. Perhaps you're missing what a collective is - it's an organization where people share equally in the results. It's characterized by self-sacrifice for the collective benefit.
The huge majority of organizations are set up for selfish benefit, not collective benefit.
Cooperation in mutual self-interest is NOT the same thing as cooperation in self-sacrifice.
Company members, for example, certainly cooperate. But the employees are doing it out of self-interest.
4 years ago by undefined
4 years ago by herval
> Collectives of people don't work, and it isn't for a lack of trying
Countries, companies, armies, sports teams, FAMILIES are all collectives of people. Not all of these organizations are voluntary, and not all are “based on self interest”.
4 years ago by WalterBright
Ones not covered in other replies:
> sports teams
Of course they are based on self-interest. Team members all have different statuses and pay. They compete with the other team members to not get cut. They switch teams to gain personal advantage.
> Countries
are forced collectives. The more the country tries to run the lives of its citizens, the worse the country does.
4 years ago by anigbrowl
Collectives of people don't work
The existence of armies and corporations suggests otherwise. I think you may be over-stretching the meaning of the term here to suggest some sort of entity that displaces individual cognition.
4 years ago by WalterBright
Corporations are not collectives. They are organizations of people with self-interest, not selfless-interest.
Armies consist of people forced to cooperate, usually under threat of death or at least imprisonment. Such cooperation isn't very efficient, and indeed armies tend to be extremely wasteful of lives, treasure and property.
(Volunteer armies tend to be less wasteful of lives.)
4 years ago by wombatmobile
> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours.
Oh? How old is our culture?
What were whales doing a million years ago that primates weren't that qualifies as culture?
4 years ago by drooby
Joseph Henrich, a professor of human biological evolution as Harvard, has some pretty good theories on the subject.
He defines culture as, ”the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.”
He estimates that our ability to use culture started at perhaps a million or so years ago, maybe a bit more, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.
This article challenges his ideas bit since he seems to think that culture is unique to our species, and in contrast these researches of course claim wales have it too.
I think the largest point of contention may lie in the definition of culture. Does the ability to communicate danger really amount to “culture”?
4 years ago by slowmovintarget
I think we keep torturing ourselves by forgetting our own language. Whales do not have a culture. They may be intelligent and social creatures, they may communicate, but they don't have civilization, art, morals, laws, and the practices for developing and improving these things in the minds of our children.
The origin of the word is to cultivate, from Latin, and implies building and transmission. Familial training in whale pods for feeding techniques is not the same thing. It seemingly echoes some facets of the immensely more complex concept we call culture, but saying that of whales is reductionist in way that isn't useful for clear thought.
Perhaps we can blame modern dictionaries, because the older ones shed more light on the matter: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/culture
4 years ago by SamBam
Sure, whales cannot have "culture" if we define it as "art, morals, laws" etc, by definition.
But we also need a word for a shared, passed-down learned experiences.
Such a thing has been observed in numerous species. For example, certain groups of gulls have learned to drop shells onto the rocks to smash them open. Similar gulls in other areas have not learned this. The ones that have have passed this lesson down for generations.
"Culture" to me sounds like a perfectly-good word for it. Cambridge Dictionary has the definition "the way of life of a particular people, esp. as shown in their ordinary behavior and habits."
Words can have multiple meanings in different contexts.
4 years ago by wombatmobile
> they don't have civilization, art, morals, laws, and the practices for developing and improving these things in the minds of our children
How can you be so sure of that?
Clearly they don't build roads, city halls, cinemaplexes, court houses, theatres, or boxing rings, and they didn't invent Spotify, but neither did you do any of that, and you have culture, don't you, even if you don't engage with any of those examples from 20th century homo sapien culture?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190337
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/130425-hu...
http://www.replicatedtypo.com/cultural-transmission-observed...
https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~barrett/documents/Asoundapproach...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
https://ceal.lab.uq.edu.au/project/cultural-transmission-hum...
4 years ago by zikzak
I love the "Wales" typo, here. :)
4 years ago by darksaints
Whales can communicate with dolphins as well as other caetacians of various species. Can you communicate with chimpanzees or apes? It is quite possible that, via communication, whale culture actually is millions of years older than ours...kept alive by communicating with species as they evolve.
4 years ago by wwtrv
There are humans who can communicate somewhat effectively with chimpanzees using sign language, does that mean humans now have access to the several hundred year old chimp culture? I don’t think so.
Anyway, while we can assume that whales and dolphins have exhibited advanced behaviors throughout the time their species existed do we have any evidence that these behaviors did not develop independently in different populations and were lost or recreated again over those millions of years?
4 years ago by WalterBright
> Can you communicate with chimpanzees or apes?
Sure. This was well documented by a movie in the 1960s. The apes were at first quite surprised that humans could talk.
4 years ago by wombatmobile
Also dogs, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Thai.
Have you not ever taken a dog for a walk and been required to change course when the dog indicates its preference to you in a non-negotiable, but culturally acceptable way?
4 years ago by blondie9x
Sperm Whales Clicking You Inside Out — James Nestor at The Interval - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsDwFGz0Okg
4 years ago by anadem
THANKS! very cool talk and video!
4 years ago by pvaldes
In the same sense as birds in a flock flee when one of them is attacked and start a distress call. Sperm whales enjoy a very long distance communication that allow them to keep contact at several Km.
> “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”
Not necessarily. It depends on the species and males and females behave differently. Some whales at least have a strong sense of individuality. They are one of the very few animals known to call other specimens by its individual name. The big sperm whales have a sort of matrilineal culture (Pygmy and dwarf sperm whales are solitary probably. Males definitely only care about themselves).
In any case this would be the common behavior, as seen in many fishes, spiders, mammals or birds.
Talking about societies in many dolphins is justified, and not a new thing. Like elephants or humans, they have grandmas also, that is also an uncommon trait. Grandmas keep mental maps of the territory. This is useful to drive the other members directly to that hidden submarine mount that is plenty of fishes. Grandmas also take care of the young whales in surface playgrounds while their mothers dive deep to hunt.
4 years ago by greenfellowman
Fascinating that they responded to the 19th-century whalers by swimming upwind to escape their murderers. Sadly this escape failed as ships went fossil.
4 years ago by ngcc_hk
Seems got only 1/2 of the story. Ma be it is a story in making. As life is.
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