It can well be imagined, if we ever do communicate with whales, dolphins, or porpoises, the kind of reception that this sort of literature will receive from the cetaceans.
The limited point of view of the whales as “dumb beasts” neglects the adaptations that have taken place in non-mammalian forms with very much smaller brains but with comparable bulk of body. The 60-foot whale shark, a plankton eater, and like the rest of the sharks a water-breather, has a bulk of body comparable to that of the larger whales. It has a large brain cavity but a very small brain in a small part of this large cavity. (It is very difficult to find the weight of these brains to compare with that of the cetacea and other mammals.) The problem of brain weight versus body weight versus intelligence is most clearly expressed by Gerhardt von Bonin in his paper in the Journal of General Psychology (1937).[6] He gives a very extensive table for mammals, their brain weight, their body weight, and the values of 2 parameters for their specification. He then states, “it is clear from all that has been said above that the figures given here are nothing but a description of facts, a description which, in the mathematical sense of the term, is the ‘best’ one. It does not pretend to make any enunciation about the relation of intelligence and brain weight. For that purpose we need a much broader psychological basis than we have at present.
“Former attempts to analyze the relations between body weight and brain weight suffer from three deficits: (1) they presuppose a correlation between intelligence and brain weight, (2) they make suppositions about the intelligence of animals which are unproven, and (3) they are based on a conception of cortical function which can no longer be considered valid.... There is a close correlation between the logarithms of brain and body weight, and this co-relation is linear. Brain weight increases as the 0.655th power of body weight. The value of the cephalization co-efficient k differs from species to species. Whether or not this is an indication of the intelligence of animals must be left to the psychologists to answer.”
One of the problems that the whales have, as compared to, say, the large shark, is breathing air while living in the sea. This requires that these animals reach the air-water interface relatively frequently—at least every one hour and a half for the bottlenose whale (Hyperoödon), three-quarters of an hour for the Sperm Whale (Physeter catadon), and every six minutes for Tursiops truncatus. This puts very stringent requirements on the relationship of the whales to other events within the sea. Each whale must know where the surface of the sea is at each instant and compute his future actions so that when he does run out of air he is near the surface. He is essentially a surface-to-depth and depth-to-surface oriented animal. He must travel at high speed at times in order to recapture enough air to continue whatever he is doing under the surface. This means that he must calculate his chances of obtaining a good breath of air during rain storms and similar situations. He can be violently thrown around at the surface unless he comes up in the trough rather than at the crest of the wave. Such calculations probably require an exercise of something more than just “instinct.”
Water-breathing animals, on the other hand, have no need for such calculations. If the surface gets rough, they move downward and stay there. The required maneuvers are very much simpler and the amount of computation is very much less.
This requirement for the whales implies that the information coming from every one of the senses, not just the skin, needs to be correlated very rapidly and in complex patterning to allow the animals to predict their future course safely and accurately. It also requires the use of large amounts of information from memory.
The predators of the sea, other than the whales themselves, make life in the sea rather a complex business for mammals. The very large sharks can and do attack whales, dolphins, and porpoises. At times such attacks are by overwhelming numbers of sharks on a relatively small number of dolphins. All of the older animals in our experience have at least one shark bite on them—the younger animals are protected by the older ones and most of them are not so dramatically scarred.
The whales, in turn, must track their own prey in order to obtain food. With the single known exception of Orca, none of their predators are air-breathers. In general, the whales’ diet consists of fish, squid, or other water-breathing organisms of the sea.
A scientific assessment of the position of these animals in the competitive environment of the sea is not yet fully evaluated quantitatively. Any pronouncement of the requirements in regard to new complex adaptations to new complicated situations and hence the evaluation of intelligence of these animals at this time is premature and presumptuous. The whole issue of the meaning and the use of these large brains is still very much unknown. As I say in Man and Dolphin,[7] I am espousing a plea for an open-minded attitude with respect to these animals. It would be presumptuous to assume that we at the present time can know how to measure their intelligence or their intellectual capacity. The usual behavioral criteria used in evaluation of intelligence of other animals are obviously inapplicable to a mammal living in the sea. As McBride and Hebb[8] so clearly stated, they cannot place the dolphin in any sort of intellectual comparative intelligence scale; they did not know the appropriate experimental questions to ask in order to compare the dolphins with the chimpanzees, for example. Comparing a handed-mammal with a flippered-mammal, each of which lives in an entirely separate and distinctive environment, is a very difficult intellectual task even for Homo sapiens.
In pursuing possible measures of intellectual and intelligent capacity, what line should one pursue? I explored this question somewhat in Man and Dolphin, but wish to summarize and extend it here in this discussion. The invariants that we are seeking somehow do not seem to be as concrete as “tool-making and tool-using ability” by means of the hands which has been one of the major alleged criteria for human adaptation and success. The chimpanzee and the gorilla have the hands but they do not have the brains to back up the use of the hands. Man has both the hands and the brain. Thus we can quite simply and concretely contrast the performance of the large brains of man with his hands to the smaller brains of the primates with their hands. When we consider the whales, we seem obsessed, as it were, with the necessity of our own nature to look for an analog of the hand and the manipulative ability. May it not be better to find a more general principle than just handedness and its use?