New England Aquarium; WGBH Forum Network; In Defense of Dolphins; 3568-2007_05_29.avi

Tonight we're happy you will always read this book which will be here after the lecture. Dr weight is professor and director of the Center for this university. In addition to numerous articles right. Right on Discovery. He's also a project which is speaking tonight. All right. Thank you very much. I'm really delighted to be here and I'd like to thank Vicki for the opportunity and the aquarium for the opportunity to be doing this talk and also to thank them for their hospitality. Before I get into anything about the substance of the talk I want to point out that you probably do not know that 2007 is

actually the year that often the United Nations the UN Environmental Programme and the convention for migratory species to UN offices in Bonn Germany who have charge of this kind of thing decided 2007 should be the year of the Dolphin. So serendipitously we get to observe that tonight in this way. One other logistical issue before. You know I did that before and I say it said to Vicky that I wasn't going to do it again but I just did. So bear with me while I press the right button. Thank you. There you go. I'll talk for a little under an hour and then or maybe less than that and then we'll have questions and discussion. Do me a favor if you would hold your questions until until I get through the first batch of comments that I want to make. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion. The.

General theme that I'm going to be talking about. Is related to a book that I've just released. BLACKWELL publishing two of my my favorite people from Blackwell are here. I have to thank also for this called In Defense of dolphins the new moral frontier. Now when Vicki was introducing me if you were listening you would have heard her say that I have a chair in business ethics that I've done philosophical writing and you may be thinking well what does a what do any of those things have to do with one another in a business ethics philosophy and dolphins. And so it probably makes that wallet. It seems to make sense to me. It probably would behoove me to say. A little bit about what it is why it is that a philosopher writes a book about dolphins and what those connections are. Because in fact there are legitimate connections. The it is not the case that I got into. As I think some of my colleagues believe that I got into doing research on

dolphins so that I could hang out on a research boat in the Bahamas and deduct some sunscreen on my income taxes as a research expense that in fact there are there are genuine connections and so I want to take a minute to explain how I got into this because it really is an accident that this is this is about the last thing that. Thank you. The last thing I ever thought I would have been doing. But in the in the mid 80s I had written a short ethics textbook for Prentice Hall and on the basis of that because I have a fairly readable style practice hall asked if I'd do one of these huge introductory philosophy textbooks. The idea being that it's one of these books that coats you know covers soup to nuts and you know for introductory students. But what they wanted wasn't just an intro philosophy text what they wanted was a book that talked about philosophical issues that I got to get to the philosophical topics by talking about things from other disciplines.

Well I knew enough about psychology to be able to get to and do a chapter or two sort of through some psychological issues and philosophy and theoretical physics or close enough that I I knew I could sort of talk about the new physics and get to some philosophical issues but they I had to have something from the natural sciences and I was not a science guy at all. I in fact as I mentioned to the staff I did an informal talk earlier today with the staff of the aquarium and I fessed up to the fact that my background in science was this that when I was in college we all had to take a one year science requirement and the way that I dealt with it was to take the one year General biology course because it was the only science course that did not have a lab and I chose it for that reason and I figured OK I escaped I got through it and that's the last thing I'm going to have to do with science so frankly when I got into this I thought I really do not know that much about this. I'm going to have to figure out a way to do something

particularly with a topic out of biology. Well while I live in California now I grew up on the south shore. I grew up in in Weymouth. And you know by the water and as you know you can't be around the ocean and not hear interesting stories about dolphins. Also at the same time that I was trying to figure out how to put this book together. A friend of mine came back from Florida with some literature about dolphin swim programs. And at that point I knew as a writer you can have some really interesting experiences. So I thought well OK I'll figure out a way to talk about a philosophical issue related to the research on dolphins. And. You write that chapter and it'll it'll be a one sort of a one time thing. Well that was the summer that was the spring of 1988 when I started. So actually this project started in 1988 and is coming to fruition now. I thought it as I said it was going to be a one time thing. So I start working on this chapter

in this philosophy book as it happens that summer the summer of 1988 I had a post-doctoral seminar at Berkeley that was on Socrates. Obviously I do all these things that are really well connected. But I was in California and people had given me some Dolphin researchers names to contact to know learn more about dolphins for that chapter I was working on. But as I when I got to California I discovered that there were a couple of big controversies surrounding dolphins that were very well known on the West Coast that weren't known on the East Coast at all. And at that time I was living in New Jersey. There was the dolphin tuna controversy. Now you know when you go and you look for to buy tuna you look for the dolphin safe label. Well in the late 80s this was this was not off the ground at all. And because the U.S. tuna fleet sailed out of San Diego there was much controversy about the deaths of dolphins in the eastern tropical Pacific. And also because Sea

World is headquartered in San Diego there was much controversy about the captivity of dolphins in entertainment facilities. So as I was trying to do this one piece sort of this one chapter in this book I realized that not only was there kind of a basic philosophical issue about what kind of beings dolphins were. But there are these bigger ethical issues. And so I started getting pulled in and it got more complex and I finished the one chapter and then continued to to look into the issue. In 1990 I had the good fortune of being able to start working with Denise curtsying who runs the wild dolphin project which is a research organization that sails out of Florida. Denise has been I think since 1985 studying a community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas. The study site is about 50 60 miles north of Grand Bahama Island. And for all of those years she every summer goes

out weeks you know every week or two and simply studies observes the social behavior the family histories of this community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins. And I had the good fortune of. Her letting me come along and start observing dolphin social behavior in the wild. And the more that I did that the more that I realized just how different dolphins seem in the wild and in captivity and how much more complicated the whole question was what kind of beings are dolphins and then the second question what does that say about the ethics of human dolphin interaction. So. At that point I thought well I really want to do a book about this and it just took me a long time because of the complexities of this to get to the point of then feeling comfortable that I knew enough science that I could understand the philosophical issues and that I could then get to the point of doing the book. So that's how this all this all happens.

And so as you see there really are connections. The what I've done is to look at it as a philosopher I'm looking at the the implications the philosophical implications of the scientific research largely on the intellectual and emotional abilities of dolphins. To answer the question what kind of beings are they. Which is a kind of basic philosophical question and then the second the second question. Well from an ethical standpoint what does that say about how we treat dolphins about the ethics of human dolphin interaction and the two main areas where that comes up. Fishing industry entertainment industry. And since those are businesses as you see everything actually does tie together. So while it may be. A terrific scam in the academic world in fact it's legitimate. So I want to make it plain just what it is that what the connections are and then what the basic philosophical questions are and how this all works. Now what I'm going to talk about talking about tonight is a quick

overview of a piece of the book that looks at. Mainly this this very basic question the way we'd phrase it as philosophers is is a dolphin a person and I'll explain more about that what that what more but what that means in a minute. And the talk is going to be. A combination of science anecdotes and personal reflections of my own. It's not going to be terribly deep. There is science and much much more detail on anything that I'm talking about so if if I say something and you're really puzzled about it. I mean I hate to see a saint you see it seem as though I'm shamelessly promoting the book that is explained more in the book which. Which you can I'm sure borrow in the end a really good library once that once they buy. But I'm just going to kind of hit the high points on this. Talk about general themes and then head up towards what the the primary ethical considerations are in all of this. Now to ask the question or to talk about the issue of whether a dolphin is a person is really

revolving around the difference between considering a being as a someone versus a some thing we all clearly think of one another as someone in a not not some kind of an object. And so to ask the question is that often a person is or ask a question you know is there a way in which we're talking about a non-human person that is a non human being who is Who's Who that has that has many of the same traits that we are but just isn't isn't our species. Now if any of you ever took a philosophy course or had the bad luck of befriending marrying or having parents as philosophers you know what what we mainly do is to draw distinctions. For example if you say to a philosopher you know. Hi how are you. The answer is typically well. In what sense do you mean that. What you know. Otherwise we would have to get real jobs. And this keeps us off the

streets at night and not you know causing harm to ourselves or other people. But philosophers draw distinctions and in this case the fundamentals of the sanction we're working with is the distinction between human and person. To be a human is to be a member of a by a certain species so human is a biological label it's a biological concept. What we try to do in philosophy though is work with something which is not so much you know rooted and that is talking about what kind of beings. In this case dolphins or other non-humans might be not so much you know are you a member of a certain species but rather. Are you a being that has a certain set of characteristics that is. Are you a person now among humans. The reason that we make a big deal about this that is that we say that you know humans are persons is that we basically say look persons have rights person to be a person as opposed to be an object is to

deserve treatment of a certain sort. So that if I. If I took a baseball bat and hit the table you'd think well strange thing to do in the middle of a lecture but I wouldn't be doing anything inappropriate or anything questionable. On the other hand if I took the baseball bat and hit one of you hopefully you'd think there was something wrong about that because we don't do that to one another we were entitled to treatment of a certain sort. So the the point of the distinction here between human and person is to say is it possible to have. Members of another species who's have the same characteristics that we do. Aren't homo sapiens and therefore deserve to be treated in a way different from chairs and tables. Now the human person to sanction is something that that comes up with actual practical implications. The world of Biomedical Ethics is the first area where you tend to see that for example if someone the whole concept of someone being brain dead

and that if you disconnect life support that you are not murdering someone. If you if you believe that's the case that is if someone's brain dead and you and you remove life support that you aren't murdering someone. If you believe that you're already using the distinction because you'd agree that yes we're ending some kind of human life. But the person has already died. The individual who was unique just isn't there anymore or because the brain has ceased functioning. So that's an area where biomedical ethics is an area where the concept in fact is used on a on a practical basis. Sadly one of the other areas in our history as a species where it was used in the whole notion of slavery. The to say that well a slave is property not a person which it is is part of American history is to use the same notion that was part of the defense of slavery that you know that Africans brought over weren't really they weren't people they were property. And so part of the defense of slavery was also

was also there. So the human person distinction raises two questions. First of all are all humans persons. But the second question which is the one that we're concerned with is are there non-human persons. Now. The main way in which you've probably run into this question is the world of science fiction if you're familiar familiar with Kleynhans or Romulans or Vulcans or any of the panoply of aliens in science fiction or if you're a fan of the notion of UFOs or alien abductions those would be examples of non-human persons beings that you could communicate with who could think who could do all the things that we do but just don't look like us and are of a different biological family. However more recently. It's become apparent that even the notion of non-human person is not something that's just in the domain of science fiction. In the last month there is

now a case in Austria where there's a lawsuit asking a that a chimp be declared a person sort of a long story about why this is. But nonetheless there is a legitimate case that's being advanced there. In Spain I believe there is there is still some provisions in the legislature there that great apes other than humans. Should be regarded as persons again that they share many of the same traits that we do. So the notion of a non-human person is no longer in the domain of science fiction. There seems to be a fair amount of science to suggest that humans are not alone anymore and having traits that we used to say we were the only possessors of. What I want to do. Obviously tonight has to ask the question Are dolphins examples of that are dolphins non-human persons. Well to start it then means that we have to get some background and and be aware of of some difficulties that we might encounter and even asking that question.

First of all we have to remember that dolphins are very much like us. And when you recognize that though there's a there's a danger there's the danger that scientists refer to and thinkers are referred to as anthropomorphism. That is that when we see a behavior something that looks like what we would do in a non-human there's the danger that we we interpret it as though we were doing it that it means exactly the same thing. And there are lots of examples where we have misinterpreted what non-humans have done. The most famous example of this was a horse called Clever Hans who it was thought had the ability to do arithmetic and. In fact there was this whole I think it was in Germany this that this horse they had you know the trainer would stand there and people would put math problems to the horse and the horse would you know stomp out you know what. And what's four plus

three stomps. Some sent me up to seven. And the horse looked like the horse could do math but what they didn't realize was that unconsciously The trainer was tapping his finger. And stopped at the answer wasn't doing it deliberately the trainer didn't even know he was doing it. But initially people said well gee the horse must be able to do arithmetic it must have this intellectual ability. That's an example of anthropomorphism assuming that when you see it in a non-human It means the same thing as if a human were doing it. Now the flip side. Of all of this is that dolphins are very much unlike us which is a very important thing to keep in mind. The danger there though is that we don't appreciate the difference enough. And in that case we risk having. Making the mistake called anthropocentrism which is to interpret everything always through the lens of human behavior that is saying well

only if. It's just only if the dolphin or a chimp or an elephant does something in a way that's just like us then that's not exactly the same. So there's a kind of bias there that we have to guard against sexism and racism. This would be considered a kind of speciesism the idea that you know sometimes your standards that are that you think are neutral and objective aren't. And so in this kind of an investigation these are two of the things that we have to guard against over interpreting evidence that makes it seem as though in this case dolphins have behaved abilities like us or not interpreting them appropriately because they come from a different evolutionary line. OK. So let's get down to some of the basics on this. If the basic question is is a dolphin a person what does it mean to be a person. Now this is a general definition. What I'm going to put up is a series of traits a general definition that most philosophers would agree to as what are the main traits are

for a being to have those special traits that we've historically said are true only of humans. Well first of all you'd want to be a being would have to be alive. Secondly it would have to be aware of it the outside world in some way. You'd want to be a person you'd want it to be able to feel pleasure and pain that is to experience the sort of positive and negative sensations about the world around it getting a little more complicated now you'd want to see emotions. In that in that response in that inner world. Now getting much more sophisticated you want to you want to see some sense of self. Personality you'd want individuality. And historically we have said humans are the only beings who can look inside and say why not just because it's one thing to have a sense of awareness of the world it's another to be able to reflect on that awareness to reflect on your emotions and now have a more

complicated inner world because notice as we go down the list what we're getting is a more sophisticated inner world. We're getting more sophistication in terms of intellectual and emotional capacity and these then become the hallmarks of what it is to be a person. To be a person also you'd want to have. Behavior that is the result of choice self-controlled. Not the result of instinct not the result of just stimulus and response. After all when we behave. Hopefully most of the time it's by choice. It's one of the reasons we hold one another responsible for our actions because we believe in it. If I pick up the baseball bat and hit you over the head you must you believe I have a choice to do that. And so if I've done that and I've done something wrong I should be punished because I was responsible for that behavior that wasn't an accident that wasn't an aberration that action was a function of who I am and what I chose to do.

We'd also want a person to recognize and to treat other persons appropriately and set of abilities that are really the favorites of humans in this. We definitely want to see a series of higher order intellectual abilities. Everything from abstract thought the ability to learn. To solve complex problems and to communicate in a way that suggests thought. Now you put all of those things together. And as I said what you get is a being and in this case it doesn't matter what species we're talking about. But a being that has an increasingly sophisticated inner world increasingly sophisticated intellectual and emotional capacity the ability to say I a sense of uniqueness personality emotional life inner world. And so the question now becomes Well if that's what a person is what does the science of the last 30 to 50 years tell us about dolphins. And so what I'm going to do now is just we're

going to do some random discussion about what we know about dolphins and then we're going to come back to this definition at the end and see how how dolphins do on this score. OK first of all dolphins are whales. If you didn't know that dolphins are a small toothed whale and the family obviously as you know has non-truths whales to whales dolphins are or even though they're small they're whales and they were on the two side of the family. In fact dolphins have these very sharp cone shaped teeth. In fact I'll tell you a story about that which is one of the ways I can always remember how important that is. When I when I taught in New Jersey at at Rider college we had a January term and I would take students on basically a one week dolphin course in which I'd talk about some of these issues. And the Dolphin Research Center has kind of a one week very good introduction to dolphins which is particularly good because it's a facility that has

a community of bottlenose dolphins who live there and it's on the gulf side of the keys. So it's not that they're in concrete tanks or anything of that sort. Well one of the highlights of the week is that the students get as much time as they want sitting on the docks where the dolphins come and go. And the staff would always point out at the beginning of the week that you know that one of the things you want to do is to be sensitive to the fact that if you had your hand in the water for example as the Dolphins would come by what might be the case is that you'd have your hand in the water and a dolphin would come up and it might start mouthing your hand. Now trust me at that moment you are very well aware of just how many and how sharp those teeth are. And your first inclination of course is to yank your hand back but your inclination better not be that because you'll scrape your hand because these teeth are so sharp. Well it turns out that there's a reason that the Dolphins are doing this and it doesn't happen all the time but if a dolphin does this the staff call it the trust test.

What the dolphin is looking to do is what are you going to do or are you going to leave your hand there and trust that it's not going to chop it off. Or are you going to flinch and show that you don't trust the dolphin in which case you've failed. Now interestingly at the. Talk earlier today one of the people on the staff who had had experience with dolphins at another facility pointed out that at the facility that she worked at if you flinch and they had this was an issue also with trainers if you flinched. The dolphin felt oh we've got your number. You're now just a live toy. We're just going to spook you and in whatever way we can because you just you know you aren't you can't handle it at this other facility that I took students to. They'd always say that if you flinched. The Dolphins would think that you just weren't even worth spending any time with and they basically ignore you. So but the interesting thing about this is it's deliberate it's a trust

test. And in the book I recount an episode in another part and some other research done in Australia where dolphins do the same kind of thing. So very interesting that you have this going on as a way of checking out the relationship which by the way tells you something about dolphins. Turns out relationships are huge in terms of who they are. OK. Dolphins are mammals that they are airbreathing warm blooded. They're born alive. Nurse off with female mammary glands and have hair. Well you look at a dolphin and you don't see much hair but if you ever see a baby dolphin there are a few hair follicles. Right around the rostrum the. The beak there and they fall off fairly quickly. But dolphins have dolphins do have hair. They're mammals which in many ways they're like us the body temperature by the way is very close to ours. Big

brains you know so like us there. That's one of the ways in which there are a lot like us. Dolphins as mammals actually came from the land. This is the ancestor of all modern whales and dolphins something like this. A coastal mammal that eventually went back to the ocean Full time. Went back to the ocean Full time approximately 50 to 60 million years ago. This all Cetacea the Cetacea the biological category of whales common ancestor that we just had up of all whales and dolphins went back to the water about 50 or 60 million years ago. And the modern Dolphin the one that you see now in you know the ocean. That size body size shape configuration brain design that's about 15 million years old that got stabilized about 15 million years ago. Humans by contrast have been on the planet about three million years and the shape

size brain configuration and all of Homo Sapiens I understand it is about a hundred thousand years old. So when you. Figure 100000 years 15 million years that's one of the significant differences between our species. We have a species that's that's been. Adapting over a longer period of time has been in a different environment for a longer period of time. And one of the interesting things to speculate about is what's the significance of that and how does that bear upon questions like intelligence or self or personality or things of that sort. But this is one of the big differences between the two of us. Now the fact that Dolphins went back to the water meant that they had to adapt to life in the ocean and the ocean is a dark place and the ocean is a place where then sound is going to work better than than light. In fact one of the ways in which Dolphins had to adapt by going back to the ocean is that they became conscious breathers

you know for us when we go to sleep you know or if we become unconscious We'll continue to breathe. That's not a normal function. That's not the case with dolphins because that would have been dangerous in the water to take a breath. You know if you doze off you take a breath you're going to drown. So one of the adaptations back to the ocean is that dolphins don't really sleep the way that we do and that each breath is a conscious choice. One of the most important adaptations as I said sound is going to be very important. Is that dolphins have a sense well it's either that they have a sense that we don't have or their sense of hearing is so much more sophisticated than ours that you may as well think of it as a different sense. It's called echolocation. First of all let me show you what it sounds like. I'll play it again what you want to listen for is that kind of creaking door sound and you'll hear it

at a lower frequency and you'll hear it at a higher frequency. I'll explain what the difference is. But this is this is how dolphin scope out the world around them. OK dolphin vision is actually quite good. But I echo location is the main way in which they understand the world and perceive the world around them the way it works is this. Dolphins breathe through it's called the blowhole hole on the top of their head. Below that there are some nasal sacks and they can manipulate these sacks in order to generate these high frequency these clicks. The click will bounce off the skull and if you look at a dolphin skull at this point it's like satellite dishes kind of parabolic it'll bounce off. It'll be

projected through what's called the melon. This is a bit of fatty tissue on the front part of a Dolphins head that can be manipulated like a lens. And in fact if any of you hit while it's hard to see on dolphins if any of you have ever seen beluga whales and you see a beluga whale with its skull going like this it's manipulating its melon like a lens. The sound goes out. It will bounce off an object and is sonar that we're talking about. Bounces back in comes into the lower jaw inner ear and gets connected to the brain. Now. The. Images that dolphins get from this sound you know the sonar out sonar back is so sophisticated that it's actually three dimensional. And the best because after all sound goes through tissue sound goes through living tissue. You know if you like doesn't but sound does and the best story I can give that shows the significance of this. At the Dolphin Research

Center this facility in Florida. There was a trainer who was visibly pregnant who was working with one of the Dolphins who was pregnant and when the dolphin came up and sonar this woman's abdomen and sort of flipped over. You know we're showing her sort of growing belly and they they did this you know I'm pregnant you're pregnant isn't this school moment. Well about two weeks later I'm told. They there was a dolphin swim going on where there was this man and a woman in the in the swim and this dolphin same dolphin came up to the woman sonar and her abdomen flipped over and did the same thing. And the. Trainer handling the swim said well that's interesting. The only other time we've seen this is when this dolphin did this with Linda who was pregnant. Is it possible that you're pregnant. To which the woman's husband said I certainly hope not. Well you can guess with this story. Seven weeks later they got a call and yes the woman is pregnant but the significance is she was. Barely pregnant at that

moment. And the dolphin understood human anatomy and physiology well enough. To not only get this very precise three dimensional image but to understand what its significance was. So there were lots of stories about dolphin echolocation but that tells you a little something about. About how it how it's used and also then not clearly this dolphin understood human anatomy and physiology. Now another thing about dolphins and sound is while we know very little about how they communicate and we really don't know much about their sounds at all. One thing that we do know about. Is called a signature whistles. And I'll play you a good example of this. What you want to listen for is a high frequency sort of sweeping sound. So it's not a lower frequency sound at that high frequency sort of wavy

sound. Now the reason this is significant is that scientists have discovered that each dolphin has a unique signature whistle. Each dolphin has a unique one of these things. They in fact can track these in some way. There are relationships among like the mothers and sons relationship mothers and the sons mothers and daughters because. Basically you're kind of a way of preventing inbreeding. But it sounds like that and the and that the way that dolphins use it that it's the equivalent of a name that is that it's personally identifying information about who they are and how they use it. Now as I said we really know very little about the signature whistles and Dolphin whistles because even with with signature whistles. It's a different couple of different theories about what that what what information is

being coded and decoded. For example if you pay it's one thing to have to have a name for give I say OK my name is Tom. On the other hand though if you if I if I call a friend and say hello and that person on the other end of the line recognizes me from the sound of my voice not from the fact that I've said my name that is what they're doing then is getting personally identifying information about me from that tone from the character of the sound. And so scientists don't know that there's one school of thought that says this is what this is the way dolphins communicate personally identifiable information which is another way of saying that if you're talking about a being that has adapted to the ocean where sound is more important than vision they may even use sound in a more complicated way than we do. And in fact there are human languages where tone is significant in terms of meaning. It's not that significant in English but in other languages. My understanding

Chinese tone is very important. So it may be that dolphin sounds have that as a component of meaning but from our standpoint you wouldn't have that kind of sense of identity and name or personally identifying information unless you had a notion of self underneath it underlying it. Now speaking of self because this becomes one of the most important factors as far as what humans like to talk about when it comes to issues of. Personhood and is there any other evidence that would suggest that dolphins have a sense of self. Well among humans human developed child developmental psychology there's an important test that's done to determine at what point a child has a sense of self and it's about putting a child in front of a mirror and seeing what they'll do do they think that the image in the mirror is another baby as another child or do they recognize that it's themselves.

It varies in terms of brain development it's very significant. At a certain point a child. Looks at the mirror knows it's themselves and knows that it's their reflection. And so you get as I said a number of very sophisticated intellectual operations going on. So what scientists have done is to say well what would happen if we put other. Animals other non-humans in front of the mirror to see what would happen. Well it seems as though chimps do pretty well on the the mirror test. I think at least one gorilla has done well. I've heard very recently there's evidence that elephants may do pretty well in this regard. So the question is where where did Dolphins stand on this. OK so let me show you a good This seems to be working a wee. Bit of. This. OK. And this is from some work that was done by Diana

Reese and Lori Marino Diana Reese from Columbia University and the New York Aquarium. Lori Marino. Of Emory University some work that they've done on dolphin mirror self-recognition among dolphins. This is a dolphin. This is it's refl.. Take a look and see what you think. Now there's certainly good reason to think that what you have going on there is a dolphin mugging for it's sort of playing with its own reflection and that it is not acting as though it's another dolphin. In fact if you have any experience with dolphins in the wild you know that when they go head to head it's very aggressive. No two dolphins would do would behavior like that in the wild if it were because it would be an aggressive

encounter. And so there's good reason to think that you have dolphins like chimps and gorillas and maybe elephants that having a sense of self. Now that's really significant. However when we go back one bit on this remember I said that dolphins You sound more than they use vision. So while dolphins do really well on this you have to figure that they are operating in what some scientists refer to as a foreign cognitive environment. That's not their main way that they operate. Vision is not the way the main the main way they operate. A real test would be a sound test but I've talked with the scientists who worked on this and they haven't really figured out what that what that would be. That is how you figure out whether a being that sonic can identify itself from something about the I guess the echo of its own sound. So it's impressive. Not only is it impressive that dolphins seem to do well on this score. It's impressive because they're operating in a domain that's not really their strong suit which is

especially impressive as far as. Intellectual and cognitive capacity. And knowledge is obviously. Chris the nose rings. One of the ways in which we see that can be made that that probably means we're hardwired with your knowledge. For example this is a monkey brains dark brains brain human brain brain. The differences between these brains is obviously for the size. Of brains very bottlenose dolphins is bigger than that of a human brain. More importantly than the size you see these older generations are there in these rooms the full. Possible to have more gray matter on a brain the foldings make it possible to have a greater cerebral cortex which is where we say that historically and

traditionally our higher intellectual functions. Reside. Now it's also it's true that the dolphin brain is bigger than the human brain but it's also true that it's less dense that neurons are more tightly packed in this brain than in this brain. This brain has a different design than this but nonetheless looks pretty significant that you've got you've got fairly big brains there. Now as I said we also we do have ways in which the brains are different. And one of the interesting scientific challenges and philosophical challenges is when you see the differences which one is the standard What's the standard for then which is which has something and which is lacking something. For example the coloring on this shows that. We do have this is a motor strip on the human brain. We have a motor strip on the on the dolphin brain. This is where where your brain the capacity for engaging and certainly certain activities reside a touch strip. This is sort of a sensory strip. You have

hearing here. You have vision here and notice that you've got on the dolphin brain this stuff is all really close together. The human brain you have this stuff here you have sound here you have vision back here. And. Dolphin Scientists call this an example of cortical adjacency that is in the cortex of the dolphin. You have more of these capacities clump together better and they can tell you ways in which dolphins seem to perform some tasks better than humans because their stuff is all clumped together. And on the humans it's more spread out. So. You say OK well which is a better way which is a worse way. Is this the right design or is this the right design. Hard to say. This is an example of a human brain dolphin brain now and the human brain you have two lobes what are called the limbic lobe. And supra limbic globe. Well the dolphin brain you have the same thing limbic lobe super limbic low but then you have this third lobe in here we don't have that. Well does that mean that the

Dolphins have something that's superfluous or does that mean that we are lacking something. Again the point of this is to is to suggest that when you start talking about intelligence and you start talking about brain there's some very suggestive evidence there but part of that what suggestive is just how different everything is. And we have to be very careful about saying that to be intelligent you have to do everything exactly the way that that humans would. Now there are some empirical measures that scientists use to suggest levels of intelligence. One is the ratio of the weight of the brain to that of the spinal cord and. With humans we get a ratio of 50 to one with dolphins 40 to one apes eight to one cats five to one horse's 2.5 and fish actually less than one. The idea here is that this measure tells you something about the kind of cognitive sophistication going on in that. Excuse me in that particular being another favorite and one that dolphin that

scientists use is called the encephalization quotient the ratio of the brain waves to body weight. And here we have. A ratio of 71 4.6 2.3 one and weps and you see we then have humans and dolphins really. Pretty good on this score. However I remember before I said one of the dangers is the issue of whether in an unintentional way where tilting things in our direction. If you go back and you look at the encephalization quotient seven versus 4.6. Few years ago one scientist said you know we haven't thought about the difference in body fat. Dolphins have more body fat than humans do. So if you do a rough calculation and take body fat out. Notice that. The difference is less than before. An example of how even in modern science we can make unintentionally make mistakes that instead of thinking that there's this big difference maybe the differences even

less which then becomes certainly less significant. I want to go through a couple of things really quickly so that I'm not running over. There's been some very interesting research on the capacity of dolphins to understand human language research. One dolphin using hand signals learning hand signals in an artificial language another using sound. The Dolphins did extremely well this was research done over 20 years at the University of Hawaii understanding commands understanding commands and a human artificial language. But there again we have a problem of will. You know we don't really see that same kind of thing in Dolphin life. So again the fact that dolphins can operate. In a world intellectually that doesn't seem to be there is another example of just how much intellectual capacity there may be there. And one other point about this which I go into it Samekh some considerable extent in the book that I can take the time. Here. There's some very

interesting theory and research done by a neurologist John Wilson who has it argues that the reason that. We humans have language the way we do is because we have hands and that hand and the brain co-evolved. That is and that many of the measures that we have of intelligence are driven by the fact that our brains developed in order to accommodate what we needed to do with these with it with hands. Now that raises the question OK what do you have then if you have a dolphin with a big brain. No hands. What's the dynamic of the development of the brain in relation to that body. At the very least you probably are not going to look for language the way you see it in humans because you don't have these things working with the brain. Nobody knows exactly what that means. But again it suggests that

intelligence might look very different in the water intelligence in dolphins might be very different than intelligence in humans for as simple a reason as the fact that we've got these things and they don't. Which then means that things like intelligence language might have to be defined and understood in a species specific way they might look different. Among humans dolphins chimps elephants we don't know. But again it's this thing we have to keep an open mind about. And the final thing that. We see as a fairly common marker of personhood and significant intellectual ability is the capacity to solve problems. Well the Ghana story from the Dolphin Research Center. This is a facility that not only has its own dolphins living there but it's sort of a rehabilitation rest and recovery place as well. And they got a call one time from a an aquarium in another part of the country that there was a dolphin who you know was not

doing well needed to needed some help. Would they be willing to let it come down and recover. They said of course dolphin gets shipped down. And either way the staff is now trying to figure out how to handle this because dolphins are very social. You would not want to put a dolphin into a pen by itself. And so they were trying to figure out what the best pairing would be you know where to take this new ill dolphin in with others and they find they decide on these two dolphins these two males. But one of the males likes to come and go so much that it had made a hole in the fence. As you can see this is this is right by the. This is on the gulf side of the keys. These are not concrete tanks these offenses that are more to keep other things out than to keep the Dolphins in. And one of the dolphins in the pen had made a hole through the fence so that he could just come and go rather than jump over the fence. Well what the staff did was to patch up the hole because they were afraid that this new dolphin would be in there get panicked might shoot out through the

hole get lost and could die. What they didn't know was that after the day after they had patched the hole the other dolphin went back and opened it up again. So that new dolphin comes down. They put it in and it's panicky because it's in a new environment. And what they feared happened did it sees the hole it shoots out through the hole and takes out for the open ocean as the staff is trying to figure out what to do. The two dolphins in the pen take off after the third catch up with it turn it around and bring it back. Now as though that weren't impressive enough now that the other dolphin has come down it doesn't want to come back in the pen. Because going through openings like this or this is there seems to be an instinctive aversion among dolphins to do that. And it trained dolphins to go through that which is called gaiting is a really tough thing to do. Well now to this other dolphin had calmed down. It didn't want to go through that hole. So again the staff is trying to figure

out what to do these other dolphins one comes back and forth. Through the hole to show it's OK and what to do. All three of them come in a patch the hole and everyone lives happily ever after. Well the fascinating thing about that of course is that you have a really serious problem a complex problem one that couldn't be anticipated. Absolutely not in the normal life of a dolphin and they solve not one but two dimensions of it. So you get two very significant complicated problems. The Dolphins solve it. Now and there's other research and problem solving that that's my favorite example of of that kind of thing. So if you go back to where we started that is this definition of personhood being alive aware the ability to feel pleasure and pain have emotions self-consciousness recognizing other persons higher order intellectual abilities. I'd contend that dolphins do really well on this. In fact after all the years I've been working on this I believe that dolphins are non-human persons and that that

then raises important ethical questions in a couple of different ways. But you know it then you know it forces us to start thinking about non-humans in a different way and the other big ethical issue of course is the use of dolphins in captive facilities. Is that OK is the captive breeding that we use. OK. If you decide it's not what do you do about the 400 or more captive dolphins that are that are in facilities you can't let them go into the wild they'd all die. But again it poses very serious problems for our species. Of now kind of recognizing that the traditional assumption that we all had for thousands of years that humans were absolutely unique on the planet unique in having a sense of self a sense of identity the capacity to think in a complex way and that we were the only species for whom individual life counted.

That that's something that it may be time for us to seriously consider reconsider our assumptions about. And as I said while I've been talking only about dolphins there's interesting research that that brings up very similar issues about about other mammals and chimps elephants for example. And. I think that as a species we're now at the point where we have to take very seriously the idea that we are no longer as alone as we thought we were. Thank you very much.