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Originally Posted by chiuchimu
I just spent 30 minutes looking around for proof that whales are self aware and I found nothing that proves dolphins are self aware. In fact, it is still disputed among the scientific community on the relevance to intelligence this self-aware tests are. Even the method of using a mirror and observing behavior is a highly questionable method of experimentation. The experiments are inconclusive, yet the people who did the experiments feel the results imply that dolphins have self-awareness. This goes to show you that the very people doing the experiments are bios. Scientist should never interpret results but accept the results as proven or not proven - that's what they taught us was the scientific method in Bio101. It's amazing how some scientist can be bios towards a cause and get away with it.
As clockwork, what does appear a lot on the internet is people using this implied result as an argument against whaling. Some tactfully argue that even if the results only imply self-awareness we should error on the side of caution just in case a future test does confirm awareness in whales. If that is so, then we must all starve since we don't know for sure if any plant or animal is self-aware. Evolution is a continues branching tree. There are no signs saying "This side for self-aware that side for brainless animals".
Next, the only tests I've seen were on dolphins and Beluga whales in captivity. So in the near future, if someone conducts the same mirror test on wild dolphins out at sea and gets different results, this would unarguably destroy the dolphin self-aware theory. More importantly, until such experiment show the same results for captive as well as wild dolphins, this mirror awareness argument carries ZERO weight. A trained lion and a wild lion act differently. I expect the whales will too.
Furthermore, no other whale species other than the two named has been tested as far as I know, so all other whales could be stupid cows of the ocean that don't deserve protection. In other words, as stupid as the aware argument is, it doesn't even apply to all other whales.
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I think the arguments for whales and dolphin self awareness is pretty solid.
The main experiment concerns a dolphin being able to recognise itself in the mirror. Most animals when they look in the mirror they think they are seeing another animal or some dont even recognise what they see. Dolphins are able to look into a mirror and see that they are seeing themselves. This pretty much proves that dolphins are aware of themselves.
Other evidence concerns the fact that Whales and dolphins communicate with each other via "song". Scientists have recognised this as a sort of language and have shown that some even "name" each other.
I gave two links before which referenced scientific studies which suggest this.
It only has zero weight if you think that the only way to prove self awareness is to start talking English (or Japanese).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/we.../27angier.html
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Yet many biologists who study whales and dolphins view such a compromise as deeply flawed, and instead urge that negotiators redouble efforts to abolish commercial whaling and dolphin hunting entirely. As these scientists see it, the evidence is high and mounting that the cetacean order includes species second only to humans in mental, social and behavioral complexity, and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about what we’re harvesting or harpooning, but whom.
“At the very least, you could put it in line with hunting chimps,” said Hal Whitehead, who studies sperm whales at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “When you compare relative brain size, or levels of self-awareness, sociality, the importance of culture, cetaceans come out on most of these measures in the gap between chimps and humans. They fit the philosophical definition of personhood.”
How much more personable can you get than to wave the flag for tribe or team? Among sperm and killer whales, Dr. Whitehead said, “there’s a feeling of what one might call ethnicity or cultural identity, of saying, ‘This is my clan, and it’s different from the others.’ ” One way whales express their ethnicity is through dialect. Every clan has its signature call, and in regions of the ocean where two clans overlap, the differences between calls become exaggerated. “It’s like if you’re Irish and you run across someone who is Scottish or Welsh,” said Dr. Whitehead. “You’ll speak with an even stronger Irish accent to make it really clear whose group you belong to.”
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