Humans are not the only intelligent animal on this planet...

Lonbjerg

Diamond Member
Dec 6, 2009
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And my cat stares at me and runs to the door to be let out when he gets my attention.

Dolphins have a funny brain to bodymatter ratio....look it up ;)
Besides this is not a trained dolphin, trained to certain tasks....but a wild one ^^
 

Geosurface

Diamond Member
Mar 22, 2012
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Dolphins have a funny brain to bodymatter ratio....look it up ;)

It's true, they do have very large brains for their body size. I believe their ratio is somewhat better than our own, even.

HOWEVER:

The reason for this is that the portion of their brain which deals specifically with spatial navigation is far larger than ours.

This is also the reason that Eskimos have the largest brains of all human groups, and when whites first encountered them they marveled at their ability to trace their way back from hunting expeditions in the frozen expanse using landmarks the whites could not perceive.

Yet, Eskimos do not score the highest of any group on IQ tests. That would be Ashkenazi Jews and then East Asians next after them.

This is also why when Eurasians switched to an agricultural existence their total brain size actually DECREASED, the navigation/spatial center of the brain became less necessary in a more stationary environment, and shrunk accordingly (brains are incredibly resource-hungry and nature isn't keen on permitting unnecessary brain function to stick around)

Regardless, back to dolphins... without real culture and the ability to pass along massive amounts of learned information from previous generations as we can, and without the ability to manipulate their environment as we can, whatever intellectual potential they have is somewhat meaningless...

and intellectual ability does a back and forth with it's use, so the brain will enable certain behaviors, then those behaviors will in turn influence the brain... a very complex dance. As in, you start to be a species that makes tools and now natural selection has the ability to sort of get a grasp on that and select for it's increase or decrease.
 

piasabird

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
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Lots of whales and dolphins can be quite playful and even diablocol with other creatures. Dolphins for some reason seem to be friendly at times with humans. Maybe they can read our minds or something.

I thought some of the brain activity was like sonar.

I cant believe you are trying to psycho analyze dolphins. Dolphins are mamals, so no reason they can be as smart as a horse or a dog or a monkey.

So if you have a large brain for interpreting sonar maybe the leap to mind reading might be possible. Maybe sound waves and brain waves can both travel in water.
 
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Agent11

Diamond Member
Jan 22, 2006
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I think whales and dolphins are intelligent, problem is they lack the appendages to manipulate their environment, so they will always be at the mercy of man.
 

Jaskalas

Lifer
Jun 23, 2004
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So if you have a large brain for interpreting sonar maybe the leap to mind reading might be possible. Maybe sound waves and brain waves can both travel in water.

You're incredulous. Don't you think we would have detected if such waves were emanating from the human body?
 

davmat787

Diamond Member
Nov 30, 2010
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Another Dolphin fun fact: If you graph the frequency of the different noises, or "words" dolphins produce and use to communicate, the graph line is about 45%. Same as humans.

Saw this in a very interesting documentary, will find an article later.

edit: octopi are very intelligent as well, and show very good problem solving and memory capacities.
 

Lonbjerg

Diamond Member
Dec 6, 2009
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Another Dolphin fun fact: If you graph the frequency of the different noises, or "words" dolphins produce and use to communicate, the graph line is about 45%. Same as humans.

Saw this in a very interesting documentary, will find an article later.

I know....the law about content with "meaning" in it....unlike static.
Used to analyze signals looking for E.T. too.
 

stormkroe

Golden Member
May 28, 2011
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I've always been amazed at the affinity even wild animals can have toward humans when they haven't had sufficient human contact to learn to fear us.
 

davmat787

Diamond Member
Nov 30, 2010
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I know....the law about content with "meaning" in it....unlike static.
Used to analyze signals looking for E.T. too.

Yep, exactly what I was referring too. Very interesting stuff, and it could in theory allow us to communicate with Dolphins if we were able to crack their code, and produce a human to dolphin translator thingy. :awe:

So guys, make sure your tuna is certified Dolphin safe, we don't want our first communication with them to be nothing but f u's.
 

Whiskey16

Golden Member
Jul 11, 2011
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This is also the reason that Eskimos have the largest brains of all human groups, and when whites first encountered them they marveled at their ability to trace their way back from hunting expeditions in the frozen expanse using landmarks the whites could not perceive.

Yet, Eskimos do not score the highest of any group on IQ tests. That would be Ashkenazi Jews and then East Asians next after them.

This is also why when Eurasians switched to an agricultural existence their total brain size actually DECREASED...
Bunk.

Prejudicially and ignorantly racist to boot.

Considering your sick record of posting violent racially divided supremacism on this forum, I am not surprised to see you here promoting that above crap.

Geosurface, your expectantly racist filth is unwelcome here. :colbert:

Seriously, considering your record, leave with your supremacist bile and take your long lambasted early 20th century racist pseudoscience with it.
 

piasabird

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
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I read a book once, I know I have actually read books, amazing. Anyway one of the things the author talked about is this concept that some prehistoric cro magnum races brains might have functioned differently and maybe they had very long memories. The book was fiction but the author seemed to have done a lot of research in fossils and the early history of man in Europe. Anyway the book was titled "Clan of the Bear Cave" or something similar.

I know the book was fiction, but it was rather interesting.
 

Darwin333

Lifer
Dec 11, 2006
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Bunk.

Prejudicially and ignorantly racist to boot.

Considering your sick record of posting violent racially divided supremacism on this forum, I am not surprised to see you here promoting that above crap.

Geosurface, your expectantly racist filth is unwelcome here. :colbert:

Seriously, considering your record, leave with your supremacist bile and take your long lambasted early 20th century racist pseudoscience with it.

I don't pay attention to many specific posters here so I don't know about the rest of your post and honestly don't care to research it but it appears he is at least partially right.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4390365...les-have-bigger-brains-eyeballs/#.UQB0-GfjFyM
 

Whiskey16

Golden Member
Jul 11, 2011
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Darwin, thank you, but Geosurface is not at all correct and your link re-enforced Geosurface's racist bunk and false supremacist inference for intelligence:

The investigators noted that the amount of light that reaches Earth's surface decreases the higher one goes up in latitude. They reasoned that in order to compensate, both eyeballs and the brain regions linked with vision might increase in size. Nocturnal primates do have larger eyes than ones active during the daytime, presumably in order to help them see better in the dark, and the same holds true for birds that sing earlier in the dawn, when light is sparse.
..
"That might be mistaken for implying that intelligence increases with latitude," said researcher Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford. "Our data suggests that this isn't so."
Geosurface has re-enforced his forum record as a racially supremacist extremist, and in great consideration to his recorded advocation for violence, of the type that should be removed from this site.