An implicit assumption is that only human beings have a special organ called a ‘complex brain’. Ergo, man rules. Unfortunately inconvenient truths have needled this hypothesis: chimpanzees that counted, ants that made empires, parrots that constructed meaningful sentences, and elephants that demonstrated empathy. One school of animal behaviourists says it is important to study animal behaviour to pry out those elusive attributes that made us special. The other camp has decided that just like science proved the earth to be an an ordinary rock going around the sun, people’s brains too aren’t special.
A study, ‘The social and cultural roots of whale and dolphin brains’, published on Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, links the complexity of the culture and behaviour of cetaceans to the size of their brains. Whales and dolphins (cetaceans) live in tightly knit social groups, have complex relationships, talk to each other and have regional dialects — much like humans.
The research — a collaboration between scientists at the University of Manchester, the University of British Columbia, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Stanford University — created a large data set of cetacean brain size and social behaviours. They compiled information on 90 different species of dolphins, whales, and porpoises and found overwhelming evidence that cetaceans have sophisticated social and cooperative behaviour traits.
Societal and cultural characteristics, they argue, are linked with brain size and brain expansion, also known as encephalisation. The long list of behavioural similarities includes the ability to form complex alliances, ‘talking’ to each other, and looking after youngsters that weren’t their own. The scientists aver that large brains are an evolutionary response to complex, information-rich social environments. This is the first time that this idea has been applied to ‘intelligent’ marine mammals on such a large scale.
The question is, is it possible that whales can continue to evolve and acquire skills — like building Taj Mahals and the iPhone — over aeons? Certainly not, one of the authors writes, because they don’t have “opposable thumbs”. However, is there a barrier to the kind of cognitive skills they can achieve? No, says another author. This suggests that the definition of ‘intelligence’ is nebulous and while we may be waiting for a singularity — machines becoming intelligent enough to reorder civilisation — humanity could move to other bodies.
