black and white coloring, aggressively bold and carnivorous, with
singular cunning and intelligence. Fourteen seals and thirteen porpoises
have been found in the stomach of a male measuring 21 feet. The male is
usually about 30 feet in length.
Genus _Pseudorca_
_P. crassidens_: The False Killer Whale or Lesser Killer Whale. All
seas.
FOOTNOTES
[1]Among the many well-known figures of classical mythology said to have
been saved by dolphins from the sea are Eikadios, Enalos, Koiranos,
Phalanthos, Taras, etc. In many other cases the corpses were brought
ashore by a dolphin, which then expired on reaching land (similarly,
with minor variations, was this so with Palaimon or Melikertes,
Dionysios and Hermias of Iasos, Hesiod, and the boys already
referred to from Baiae and Naupaktos). Similar incidents reappear in
the writings of the hagiographers. Saints Martinianos of Kaisareia,
Kallistratos of Carthage, Basileios the younger of Constantinople,
were each saved from a watery grave by a couple of dolphins. The
corpse of Saint Loukianos of Antioch was brought ashore by a large
dolphin, which then expired on the sand. See Klement, _Arion_, 1-64,
and Usener, _Die Sintfluthsagen_, 138-180.
[2]Euhemerus (_circa_ second half of the fourth century B.C.) attempted
a rationalistic explanation of the mythology prevailing in his time.
The theory he propounded, in his novel of travel, _Sacred History_,
was simply an extension of the current skeptical-scientific attitude
to matters which until that time had been accepted without question.
That theory was that the gods were merely men who because of their
great exploits or beneficence had been accorded divine honors. In
Crete, coming upon the remains of a tomb bearing the name of Zeus,
Euhemerus argued that even Zeus had probably been no more than a
great conqueror, who died and was buried in Crete, and afterwards
deified. This creditable anthropological attempt to historicize
mythology, though it failed to convince, is nevertheless worthy of
great respect. As A. B. Cook wrote, if Euhemerus said that Zeus was
a Cretan king when he ought to have said that Cretan kings played
the part of Zeus, it is a pardonable error. (_Zeus_, I, 662.)
[3]“Saved by a Porpoise,” _Natural History_, LVIII (1949), 385-386.
[4]Winthrop N. Kellogg, _Porpoises and Sonar_, University of Chicago
Press, 1962, p. 14.
[5]George G. Goodwin, “Porpoise—Friend of Man?” _Natural History_, LVI
(1947), 337.
[6]F. Bruce Lamb, “The Fisherman’s Porpoise,” _Natural History_, LXIII
(1954), 231-2.
REFERENCES
Aelian. _On the Characteristics of Animals._ Bk. VI, 15.
Aesop. _Fables._ “The Monkey and the Dolphin.”
Alpers, Antony. _Dolphins: the Myth and the Mammal._ Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1961.
Anderson, John. _Anatomical and Zoological Researches: Comprising an
Account of the Zoological Results of the Two Expeditions to
Western Yunnan._ London: Bernard Quaritch, 1878.
Apollodorus. _The Library._ III, 5, 3.
Apostolides, Nicholas. _La Pêche en Grèce._ Athens, 1907.
Aristotle. _History of Animals._ Bk. I, 5; II, 1, 13, 15; III, 1, 7,
20; IV, 8-10; V, 5; VI, 12; VIII, 2, 13; IX, 48.
Biedermann, Paul. _Der Delphin in der dichtenden und bildenden
Phantasie der Griechen und Roemer._ Halle, 1881.
Cook, Arthur B. _Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion._ Cambridge, Eng.:
The University Press, 1914, vol. 1, p. 662.
Douglas, Norman. _Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology._ London:
Chapman and Hall, 1928, p. 161.
Euhemerus. _Sacred History._
Fairholme, J. K. E. “The Blacks of Moreton Bay, and the Porpoises,”
_Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London_, XXIV
(1856), 353-354.
Goodwin, George G. “Porpoise—Friend of Man?” _Natural History_, LVI
(1947), 337.
_The Greek Anthology._
Herodotos. _History._ Clio I, 23-24.
Hill, Ralph N. _Window in the Sea._ New York: Rinehart, 1956.
Kellogg, Winthrop N. _Porpoises and Sonar._ Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961.
Klement, Carl. _Arion._ Vienna, 1898.
Lamb, F. Bruce. “The Fisherman’s Porpoise,” _Natural History_, LXIII
(1954), 231-232.
Llano, George A. _Airmen Against the Sea._ Maxwell Air Force Base,
Alabama; Arctic, Desert, Tropic Information Center [1955 or
1956], p. 74.
Longman, Heber. “New Records of Cetacea,” _Memoirs of the Queensland
Museum_, VIII (1926), 266-278.
Longus, Cornificius. _De Etymis Deorum._
Lucian. _Marine Dialogues._ 8.
Lycophron. _Alexandra._
Nonnus Panopolitanus. _Dionysiaca._ VI, 265-266.
Norman, John R., and Fraser, F. C. _Giant Fishes, Whales, and
Dolphins._ London: Putnam, 1937.
Oppian. _Halieutica._ I, 649-654, 1089; V, 422, 519f.
Ovid. _Metamorphoses._ III, 1, 202.
Pliny the Elder. _Natural History._ IX, 8, 24-28.
Pliny the Younger. _Letters._ IX, 23.
Plutarch. _On the Cleverness of Animals._
Porphyry. _De Abstinentia._ III, 16.
Rabinovitch, Melitta. _Der Delphin in Sage und Mythos der Griechen._
Dornach: Hybernia-Verlag, 1947.
“Saved by a Porpoise,” _Natural History_, LVIII (1949), 385-386.
Schmidt, Bernhard. _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen._ Leipzig, 1871.
Servius. _Commentarii in Vergilii Aeneidos._ III, 332.
Stebbins, Eunice B. _The Dolphin in the Literature and Art of Greece
and Rome._ Menasha, Wisconsin: Banta Publishing Co., 1929.
Usener, Hermann. _Die Sintfluthsagen._ Bonn: F. Cohen, 1899.
Xenophon. _Anabasis._ V, 4, 28.
_Modern Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, as Challenges to Our
Intelligence_
By JOHN C. LILLY
The intelligence of whales has been the subject of speculation by
writers since Ancient Greece.[1][2] The discovery of the large brains of
the Cetacea in the eighteenth century led to inevitable comparisons of
these brains to those of the humans and of the lower primates. The winds
of scholarly opinions concerning the whales have anciently blown
strongly for high intelligence but during later centuries shifted
strongly against high intelligence. At the time of Aristotle (384-322
B.C.) the dolphin, for example, was held in high esteem, and many
stories of the apparently great abilities of these animals were
current.[2] By the time of Plinius Secundus (A.D. 23-79) the beginning
of a note of skepticism was introduced. Plinius said, “I should be
ashamed to tell the story were it not that it has been written about by
... others.”[1]
In the middle ages the strong influence of religious philosophy on
thinking placed Man in a completely separate compartment from all other
living creatures, and the accurate anatomy of the whales was neglected.
This point is illustrated by Figure 1, published in the 1500’s in
_Historia Animalium_ by Konrad Gesner. This was apparently a baleen
whale. It has two tubes which apparently symbolize the double blowhole
of the Mystacocetae. There is no modern whale known that has such tubes
sticking out of the top of his head. There is a huge eye above the angle
of the jaw. All whales have the eye at or near the posterior angle of
the jaw. The eye is very much smaller than the one shown here. A print
published in 1598 of the anatomy of these animals is shown in Figure 2.
The drawing of the male organ is accurate (apparently it was measured
with a walking stick), but the eye is too large and is misplaced.
These pictures illustrate very well man’s most common relationship to
the whale, which has continued to the present day. For commercial
reasons man continues to exploit these creatures’ bodies.
It was not until the anatomical work of Vesalius and others that the
biological similarities and differences of man and other mammals were
pointed out. It was at this time that the investigation of man’s large
and complex brain began.
All through these periods intelligence and the biological brain factors
seemed to be completely separated in the minds of the scholars. At the
times of the Greeks and the Romans there was little, if any, link made
between brain and mind. Scholars attributed man’s special achievements
to other factors than excellence of brain structure and its use.
After the discovery of man’s complicated and complex brain and the
clinical correlation between brain injury and effects on man’s
performance, the brain and mental factors began to be related to one
another. As descriptions of man’s brain became more and more exact and
clinical correlations increased sufficiently in numbers, new
investigations on the relationships between brain size and intelligence
in _Homo sapiens_ were started. The early work is summarized by
Donaldson.[3]
In the late 1700’s and the early 1800’s the expansion of the whaling
industry offered many opportunities for examination of these interesting
mammals. Figures 3 and 4 are dramatic examples of the state of the
industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
One of the earliest drawings of the complex brain of one of the cetacea
is that of Gottfried Reinhold Trediramus in 1818 (Fig. 5). This is an
anterior view of the brain of the common porpoise _Phocaena phocaena_.
This is one of the earliest pictures showing the complexity of the
fissuration and the large numbers of gyri and sulci.
By the year 1843 the size of the brain of whales was being related to
the total size of the body. The very large brains of the large whales
were reduced in importance by considering their weight in a ratio to the
weight of the total body. This type of reasoning was culminated with a
long series of quantitative measures published by Eugène Dubois
(_Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris_, Ser. 4, VIII
[1897], 337-376).
Descriptions from those of Hunter and Tyson onwards agree that, in
absolute size, the brains are as large and larger than those of man. All
were agreed that the smaller whales, i.e., the dolphins and porpoises,
have very large brains with relation to their body size. It was argued,
therefore, with respect to the dolphin, “this creature is of more than
ordinary wit and capacity.” (Robert Hamilton, _The Natural History of
the Ordinary Cetacea or Whales_, p. 66, in Sir William Jardine, _The
Naturalist’s Library_, volume 7, Edinburgh, 1843.)
Tiedemann’s drawings of the brain of _Delphinus delphis_ and of
_Delphinus phocaena_ were published by H. G. L. Reichenbach in his
_Anatomia Mammalium_ in 1845. The four drawings are shown in Figure 6.
These drawings show the improved awareness of the complexities of these
large brains in regard to cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, and the
cranial nerves. Correlations between the structure of this brain and the
behavior of the animal possessing it, were (and are) woefully lacking.
The only behavioral accounts were those of whalers hunting these
animals. Hunters tend to concentrate on the offensive and defensive
maneuvers of the animal, and can give useful information for other kinds
of evaluation of the animal’s behavior and presumed intelligence.
In 1787 John Hunter, writing in the _Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London_ (LXXVII, 423-424), said the following: “The
size of the Brain differs much in different genera of this tribe, and
likewise in the proportion it bears to the bulk of the animal. In the
Porpoise, I believe, it [the proportion] is largest, and perhaps in that
respect comes nearest to the human....
“The brain is composed of cortical and medullary substances, very
distinctly marked; the cortical being, in colour, like the tubular
substance of a kidney; the medullary, very white. These substances are
nearly in the same proportion as in the human brain.... The thalami
themselves are large; the corpora striata small; the crura of the fornix
are continued along the windings of the ventricles, much as in the human
subject.”
Flatau and Jacobsohn in 1899 wrote, “the large brain of the Porpoise is
one of the smallest in the Cetacean Order in which the organ attains to
a much greater absolute size than any other.”
In 1902 G. Elliot Smith wrote of the brain of a species of dolphin
called “Delphinus tursio” (which may be the modern _Tursiops
truncatus_): “This brain is larger and correspondingly richer in sulci
than that of the porpoise: but the structure of the two organs is
essentially the same.” His drawings are shown in Figures 7 and 8. He
said further, “the brains of the Beluga and all the dolphins closely
resemble that of the porpoise.”
Smith summarizes the discussion of the huge size of the whale’s brain.
“The apparently extraordinary dimensions of the whale’s brain cannot
therefore be considered unusual phenomena, because this enormous extent
of the cerebral cortex to receive and ‘store’ impressions of such vast
sensory surfaces becomes a condition of survival of the animal.
“The marvelous complexity of the surface of the cerebrum is the direct
result of its great size. In order, apparently, that the cerebral cortex
may be efficiently nourished and at the same time be spared to as great
a degree as possible the risk of vascular disturbances [such as would be
produced by large vessels passing into it], its thickness does not
appreciably increase in large animals. [He then quotes Dubois’ figures
showing that the whale’s cortex is the same thickness as that of the
human.] Such being the case, it naturally results that the increased
bulk of cortex in large animals can only be packed by becoming thrown
into increasing number of folds, separated by corresponding large number
of sulci.”[4]
In regard to communication between individual whales, Scammon in 1874
wrote the following: “It is said that the Cachalots [Sperm Whales] are
endowed with the faculty of communicating with each other in times of
danger, when miles ... distant. If this be true, the mode of
communication rests instinctively within their own contracted
brains.”[5] Let us not forget that Scammon was talking about the mammal
with the largest known brain on this planet. Instinct as the sole cause
of communication with a brain this size seems rather improbable. This
brain is not any longer considered “contracted.” Both of these
statements illustrate an authoritative view of that time. If one peruses
the paper by Tokuzo Kojima, “On the Brain of the Sperm Whale” (in the
_Scientific Reports_ of the Whales Research Institute, Tokyo, VI, 1951,
49-72), one can obtain a modern clear view of this brain. The largest
one that he obtained (from a 49-foot sperm whale) was 9,200 grams. The
average weight of the sixteen brains presented in his paper is 7,800
grams for average body lengths of 50 feet. (The brain weight per foot of
body length varied from 118 to 187 grams per foot, averaging 157; man’s
ratio averages about 250 grams per foot.)
In the literature of the time of Scammon, the scholars failed to give us
new information about the behavior of cetacea. There seems to have been
a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards these animals which is
continued today. This point of view can be summarized as follows: the
whale is a very large animal with a brain larger than that of man. This
brain is the result of the huge growth of its body. All of this large
brain is needed to control a large body. Because these tasks are so
demanding, there is not enough brain substance left for a high degree of
intelligence to develop. Thus the large brain cannot give the degree of
intellectual capability that man has.
As an example of man’s attitudes to cetaceans, consider the case of the
U. S. Fisheries Bureau _Economic Circular_ No. 38, of November 6, 1918,
by Lewis Radcliffe, entitled “Whales and Porpoises as Food.” Roy Chapman
Andrews is quoted as saying that hump-backed whale meat is the best of
the larger cetaceans but that porpoise and dolphin meat is even better
eating than that of the larger whale. The composition of the whale meat
is given as 30% protein, 6% fat, and less than 2% ash. From a hump-back
whale one obtains six tons of meat, from a Sei Whale, five tons, and
from a Finback, eight tons. Directions are given to remove the
connective tissue between the blubber and the muscle to avoid the oily
taste. For those who are interested, the paper includes twenty-two whale
meat recipes and ten porpoise meat recipes.
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?
I suggest that we think more in terms of a physiologically appropriate
set of more general mechanisms which may subsume several other human
functions under the same principle. It seems to me that we must look for
abilities to develop generalized dexterity of use for certain kinds of
end purposes for any or all muscular outputs from the central nervous
system. If there is a task to be done, such as lifting a stone, whether
in water or air, a given animal may turn it over with his foot, with his
flipper, with his hand, with his tail, or with any other body part with
which he could obtain a purchase on the stone. The end task is turning
over the stone, to obtain food or whatever. It makes little difference
what kind of muscular equipment he uses just so he uses it
appropriately.