COMMUNICATION BETWEEN MAN AND DOLPHIN

page 136:
............. The second argument for the preeminence of man over larger-brained cetaceans points to the human accomplishments of using hands, planning structures and building them. Cetaceans have no hands and therefore had no need to develop intelligence. This argument is derived from man's own narcissistic need to see the use of intelligence and sentience only in areas most men have entered. May there not be domains only a few men have penetrated in which whales may be superior? May not their philosophies and traditions be more complex, more full of insight than ours? Cut off from the need for building, for external forms of transport, for food preservation and preparation, they probably have very advanced ethics and laws, developed over millennia and passed on, through sonic communication, to their young. Their memories are probably much greater than ours. Like those among us with no written language (the Masai, for example), they probably have long histories which they recount to their young, who must memorize them in detail.

page 241:
......... We propose that the limiting factor in the physical size of a brain is the relationship between the moment of inertia of the brain and that of the head and body containing it. (The moment of inertia is the angular momentum of a mass with respect to a fixed point.) Stated more simply, the size of a brain is limited by the ability of the head containing it to resist twisting blows ....... Above a certain critical value of rotatory acceleration of the head, the brain is displaced within the skull to the point at which it will break its entering blood vessels and shear its own structure on its partitioning membranes (falx verbri and tentorium) fastened to the skull. By such displacement about axes in the brain, the brain can be so damaged that the animal goes into coma.

page 242:
......... The elephant with a 6,000-gram brain requires a large head and a large body for that brain to survive.

page 242:
......... When one realizes that the density of sea water is eight hundred times that of air, one can see that the cushioning effect of the former medium allowed the evolution of much larger brains in water than on land.

page 246:
.......... The very large cortical associational areas in the Cetacea do not preclude processes analogous to human qualities such as initiative, dedication, thinking, planning, valuing traditions, and respecting ethics and morals. One may say cautiously that at least the equipment is present in cetaceans to allow for equivalent analogues of these functions. One cannot attribute these human functions to cetaceans on a one-to-one correspondence. Cetacea live in an alien environment, have an alien evolution and alien experience. We would expect them to have computational capacities quite foreign to ours. However, we assume that the complexities of their mental operations,within their particular evolution and in their particular environment, may be comparable and even superior to ours. We can observe in their behaviour some activities analogous to human initiative, dedication and the appreciation of ethical concepts.