They are also known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) to entertain themselves.
They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.
They also have what appears to be fratricide were they bludgeon another to death targeting vital organs (I dont have a reference to this, but I recall reading it on BBC).
I have seen dumber people on and around TV.
I am sure there are HN'ers who are divers and have first had experience with dolphins, we would love to hear the stories.
This is a form of "tonic immobility" in sharks (chickens have the same reaction if held whilst looking at a line drawn away from them)
It's an attempt to feign death / stand immobile whilst danger passes.
Its effective in sharks as they need water passing over their gills so if they stop swimming they are dependant on current.
Of course orcas are big enough to turn a shark over - your average guy in a chain mail suit tries this with Jaws' older brother and it's three months of trying to get steel rings out of your teeth
"With tiger sharks 3–4 metres (10 to 15 feet) in length, tonic immobility may be achieved by placing hands lightly on the sides of the animal's snout approximate to the general area surrounding its eyes."
As someone who has seen a great white shark underwater from 15 feet away (shark caging), I can safely say that there is no human alive capable of holding a great white shark still. There is simply no stopping a 20ft long, 4000lb., aquatic dinosaur. Unless you're an orca I suppose.
One of the most impressive and intimidating animals I have ever seen.
I don't care if you're a big bad orca. If you can kill a freakin Great White Shark by holding it, that's some mf badass Kung-fu shit right there. Orcas are big and strong, but they're just flesh and bone. It's not like they're armor plated, or have electrified dive cages. It's just them, this technique, and a 5000 pound thrashing, efficiently killing, natural flesh sawing machine. Sure, they weigh like 2.5 times as much, but it would still be like me subduing an attack dog with some kind of technique. I outweigh it, but it's still scary. Personally, I'd rather just be far, far away.
Excusing the anthropomorphisation, one interesting tidbit is that the great whites have different personalities. Some were just plain mean while others were playful.
I found it odd that the author thought that was cruel of the Orcas. I assume they are referring to the waste, but that is pretty common for all animals.
I went to a dolphin show at the Vancouver Aquarium a few years back and wandered near the dolphin pool after the show. I saw one dolphin playing with what looked like a tiny piece of thread that accidentally fell into the pool. He was spitting it out, watching it dance through the water, quickly sucking it in only to spit it out and watch it wiggle, over and over. He was just entertaining himself and having a good time.
I wonder if there is a wider gap between the smartest and dumbest humans, and the equivalent extremes in other species?
At our best, we accomplish astonishing things that melt brains to consider. However, the worst of us really are little more than what they would call (with derision) "animals", responding to base urges and the like, but dangerous, vindictive and controlling.
I think the low end of human "intelligence" is something other than what you are talking about here. I think the low end of human "intelligence" would generally be associated with something more akin to mental retardation. Whereas what you're pointing out is more... like the behavior of a sociopath.
Dangerous, vindictive and controlling is not a sign of a lack of intelligence... in fact... it's probably the opposite I would imagine.
Maybe it's not that, at our worst, we're capable of being so much worse than animals, but that we can just do it so well. Or the disappointment that many could do better with a little thought, but don't think much. And there are probably comparative examples of each thing in the "animal kingdom" too.
Resorting quickly to violence to get our way (schoolyard thugs) or to get revenge or to intimidate (posturing gangs). Setting up cultish situations to dominate women and reap rewards of power, money and more (creepy sects). Online bullying (all over the place), gossip, etc.
Lying, manipulating, and tricking ("outsmarting") others require considerable theory of mind, persuasive ability, creativity, and conscientious problem-solving execution. A dumb person is not able to perform these activities well.
Understanding others, showing sympathy and compassion, being capable of working with other people with a common goal without conflict certainly require wits as well. Don't you think? It was even supposed not so long ago that dog brains grew larger over time because of their constant social contact with humans.
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In the beginning, before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like human intelligence evolved so that we could invent better tools.
The reason why this was crazy was that only one person in the tribe had to invent a tool, and then everyone else would use it, and it would spread to other tribes, and still be used by their descendants a hundred years later. That was great from the perspective of scientific progress, but in evolutionary terms, it meant that the person who invented something didn't have much of a fitness advantage, didn't have all that many more children than everyone else. Only relative fitness advantages could increase the relative frequency of a gene in the population, and drive some lonely mutation to the point where it was universal and everyone had it. And brilliant inventions just weren't common enough to provide the sort of consistent selection pressure it took to promote a mutation. It was a natural guess, if you looked at humans with their guns and tanks and nuclear weapons and compared them to chimpanzees, that the intelligence was there to make the technology. A natural guess, but wrong.
Before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like the climate changed, and tribes had to migrate, and people had to become smarter in order to solve all the novel problems.
But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.
And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...
...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.
It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.
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Yet history shows that the greatest "techies" (Kepler, Newton, Galileo, and others) did not work alone and were certainly depending on others to establish their theories and measurements - and many were very much "humanists" and universal thinkers who cared very little about politics and frontiers. Even Einstein who was a key player in developing nuclear power was against any use of it in military conflict. So, I would like to see your list of brilliant and yet cruel techies.
Newton was certainly known to be a recluse, but he was a teacher in university and spread knowledge around him. Besides, all his work rested on centuries of work before him and he recognized the heritage of others in his discoveries.
Intelligence[1] "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills"
Good[2] "that which is morally right; righteousness"
Intelligence relates to an ability to do something, Good (in this context) relates to a moral judgement. They may be related in that to do Good you may need Intelligence, but its conceivable that someone could have Intelligence but may not be Good, or vice versa.
They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dolphin+vortex+ring (a time sink right here)
They also have what appears to be fratricide were they bludgeon another to death targeting vital organs (I dont have a reference to this, but I recall reading it on BBC).
I have seen dumber people on and around TV.
I am sure there are HN'ers who are divers and have first had experience with dolphins, we would love to hear the stories.