3 hours 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...
3 hours 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.
an hour 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"...
43 minutes 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.
23 minutes ago by WalterBright
> The huge majority has always been members of communities and collective entities
Describe a collective you belong to where overall you sacrificed more for the benefit of others than you gained.
3 hours 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.
2 hours 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.)
3 hours ago by s1artibartfast
>* 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.*
It is hard to see how whales are more collective than humans. Humans for most of their existence lived in collective family units, not unlike whales.
2 hours ago by WalterBright
Families are indeed very small scale collectives. Even so, try to get the kids to clean their rooms, and you'll conclude that collective has its problems, too.
2 hours 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”.
2 hours 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.
7 hours 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?
7 hours 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”?
7 hours 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
6 hours 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 hours 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...
7 hours ago by zikzak
I love the "Wales" typo, here. :)
7 hours 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.
7 hours 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?
3 hours 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.
2 hours 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?
a day 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.
8 hours ago by blondie9x
Sperm Whales Clicking You Inside Out — James Nestor at The Interval - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsDwFGz0Okg
5 hours ago by anadem
THANKS! very cool talk and video!
2 days 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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