For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst 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 reasons.
- Douglas Adams
As Adams has pointed out so concisely, humans have historically had rather a narrow view of what constitutes intelligence. Cetacean researchers have long been able to vouch for the functional intelligence of their subjects, but a new report now suggests that sperm whales may possess names, pronounced with different timing inflections in their eerie clicking, singing language. It is one thing to be intelligent enough to work out how to solve a problem; squirrels raiding bird feeders do that in back yards all over America every day. It is quite another to have a sense of your own self-awareness, and to possess a theory of mind that allows you to extrapolate the existential experience of another being. Personal names would be one indicator of such self-awareness. Could you kill someone so easily if you knew his name and history?
Used to be, the guys that lived on the other side of the mountain were stupid idiots because they didn't do things our way. Then we saw how much we had in common with them compared to the people who lived on the other continents, who were even weirder. Now we feel such empathy for these people we've never met, people who live thousands of miles away from us, that we text hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid to them within days of a devastating earthquake.
We recognize the intelligence of others, and we understand their capacity to suffer. The human ability to expand our empathic reaction is proven, and it may yet save us all, including the whales.
Read more about it here: Sperm Whales May Have Names via Wired.com
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