Posted on 09/08/2011 9:24:29 AM PDT by twister881
“Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reason.” - Douglas Adams
Ever since Rush discussed on-air the male dolphin habit of extending a “Finger of Friendship” I have lost interest in swimming with them...
"LACES OUT!"
Bad reporting. (Suprise!)
Vocalizing isn’t the same as talking.
We don’t know if they ‘talk’ (i.e. convey information in the form of complex and abstract concepts). They do, however vocalize, using organs that are roughly analogous to our vocal cords..
But so do cows and sheep. And POTUS.
As you see from this, they call each other "dude" a lot and say "What's good, what's good," like most young guys now. Betcha didn't know that.
Hahaha I remember that and I figure it’s just nature. The coolest part was a mother dolphin and her baby of 3 months swimming within 5 feet of us. You figure if the mother dolphin wasn’t secure nothing would happen to her baby she would have not done that. Unlike some of the “Human” mothers we see today.
Fa love Pa!
I just spit on my monitor.
I wrote a program to translate dog-talk. Here’s what they were saying.
“Gimme a snack!”
“I have to pee!”
“Gimme a snack!”
“There’s a squirrel!”
“Gimme a snack!”
I shut the program down.
If dolphins are so smart, why don’t they have hospitals?
Their dorsal fins stick too far out of the hospital gowns. Dolphins are pretty vain. Now a mullet, why he’s got no pride. He’d wear a hospital gown.
“If they are so darned smart as to have speech, where are their buildings, works of art, literature etc.?”
I don’t think they are intelligent in a way comparable to humans, but still, those are very “human-centric” methods of judging intelligence. Humans are very poorly suited to living in the natural world, so we needed to develop clothing and buildings to help us survive. We also lack natural weapons, so we had to develop weapons and tools to help us procure food. Better equipped animals wouldn’t have any need of these things, but it wouldn’t mean they didn’t have the capacity to develop them if they did need them.
As for art and literature, could these things develop in an oceanic environment that is much less static than a terrestrial one? Here, if you scratch something in a cave wall or pile some stones on top of each other, they will last a long time and communicate something to another generation, but in the ocean those things would be obliterated very quickly, and not accomplish their purpose.
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