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Goldfish Smarter Than Dolphins
flergum writes "While dolphins may have big brains, laboratory rats and goldfish can outwit them. It appears that the large brains are a function of their environment rather than intelligence. From the article: 'Dolphins have a superabundance of glia and very few neurons... The dolphin's brain is not made for information processing it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water.' I guess this means that the Navy will start recruiting and training goldfish for those mine search and destroy missions."
...but don't goldfish only have a 3 second memory?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
And thank us for all the fish? Surely goldfish don't eat themselves.
I doubt it. I think this is just exactly what the dolphins want us to think. Perhaps they are hoping that we'll leave them alone if we think they're all idiots and they can get back to the heavy schedule of light swimming and intricate whistling they had planned.
.. er.... wait.. a dolphin just called me and asked how long I could hold my breath. I think this worries me...
Well I'm on to you, dolphins! I'm putting the word out! I know you're smarter than goldfish and
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Is a person that can figure out how to train an animal with a 3 second attention span:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bt6K521o3Y
or did anyone else feel Manger's credibility slipping towards the end of the article? Jumping over tuna boat nets? Come on, I'm not sure many humans would pass this guy's tests.
FTA: "If you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in,"
Truly an astounding display of cognition.
So long, and thanks for all the flakes
Summation 2
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28315
So as you can see, Douglas Adams was right all along!Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
"You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in," he said. "But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks, the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water between the different pools," he said. Manger says the thought to jump over would simply not cross their unsophisticated minds.
So because the dolphin isn't brainless enough to jump out of its tank and beach itself and die in the process, that makes them stupid? I suppose by comparison the child that plays away from road isn't as smart as the kid that plays in traffic, you know, the one that's seeking to "enlarge his environment" by becoming road pizza.
Remove the cover of the cookie jar or the potatoe chip can... the human will turn obese.
Home of Faramir Paint Shop Pro scripts
...would have been so much better with a goldfish instead of that tacky dolphin. Or instead of Keanu for that matter. Or instead of the film makers. I'll stop now.
This will demand a rewrite of that article on Wikipedia.
Also, I will have to reevaluate the Flipper, 63' edition.
I am reminded of the counter argument which noted that the enlarged part observed in Einstein's brain was due to the extra glia cells needed to support the higher activity of the same number of neurons.
I've also dived with many varieties of fish, but our interaction with dolphins off Tiputa Pass and Trousers Point (you can find both easily on Google) was qualitatively different from any with fish.
It basically sounds like Japanese propaganda to me. Might be time to make that donation to Sea Shepherd.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I'm not anything close to the people who think dolphins are really really intelligent (though Douglas Adams makes a pretty good case), but IRTFA and I can not see how this is a serious article.
It ends: "Manger also points to the tuna industry, which under consumer pressure has gone to great lengths to prevent dolphins from being caught and killed by accident in nets.
"If they were really intelligent, they would just jump over the net because it doesn't come out of the water," he said."
Umm, yea, they would if they ware smart? *sigh* - how did this make *any* news at all. Even assuming that the gist of the article is true (about the different types of brain material) the rest is crap - was it "peer reviewed" (as the article points out) by other idiots? Maybe it is all a Rovian plot to discredit Aljazeera.net? I can not take the article and it's contents with any real sense of belief - it is so idiotic that I can not trust the rest of it. That's not to say they are incorrect - just that this individual article is is pure crap and one should not use it to base any belief on.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
is Aljazeera really the best source for this information?
I can't figure out wheather to laugh my *** off or pat you on the back for your observations.. good call ; )
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The "Chicago Sun Times" offers a better version of the story.
A fly has pretty much a hard-wired brain, but it is highly effective at finding food and keeping it alive.
Some while ago, some researchers managed to get a dish of 1500 (or 15000??) rat brain cells to fly a 747 simulator -- including handling complex actions like landing with wind shear. I bet it took less time to train the rat brain than it takes for a human to attend flight school. I guess a rat brain in a pilot's uniform doesn't pick up as much skirt though.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I for one welcome our new Goldfish Overlords
..is that a single scientist pointed to the fact that dolphins have more glia than neurons and retroactively applied it as "evidence" for a preconceived theory. There is no talk of experimentation or anything, just a long and verbose way of saying "This guy thinks dolphins are stupid."
Swim. Swim. Hungry?
I've read somewhere that goldfish have a short-term memory. They seem not to be able to remember anything that happened a few dozen seconds earlier.
If thats true, I will keep the dolphin. Thanks
I think you might enjoy this.
. o o O ( Where are all the giant-brained goldfish? )
I'd take an octopus any day of the week! Not only are they excellent problem solvers, they give good massages.
You can count the number of neurons vs glia all day long, but at the end of the day dolphins seem to have MUCH better results than goldfish. Just because a certain feature normally has a certain result doesn't mean you can rewrite reality when it doesn't!
If the word "intelligence" was defined as a certain ratio of neurons to glia, he'd have a point. Of course, "intelligence" wouldn't matter so much, because it would only matter in certain situations. Much like "clock speed".
I also don't see how the "jumping out of the bowl/over the net" even deserves a mention...unless we now have a way of interviewing dolphins and goldfish.
Nature (evolution) tends to take the most efficient solution -- natural selection will favour the animals that don't need to expend so much energy to achieve the same result.
Dolphins are also not so intelligent on land.
visitors with a ball,which visitors can barely see.
better if we can free those innocent mammals used to entertain us.
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
What are these tasks? One task is locating anti-ship mines like those found in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
I highly doubt that a goldfish can perform these tasks.
We already knew that dolphins are stupid, especially on land...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I, for one, defy our would-be dolphin overlords!
' I guess this means that the Navy will start recruiting and training goldfish for those mine search and destroy missions."
Nope, in the navy, neurons are not mandatory.
That none of you have realized that you're part of plot by the american government to DoS (/.) al Jazeera is astounding... Truly an achievement of our new goldfish overlords
In future news two sequels to Finding Nemo will come out "Recruiting Nemo" and "Training Nemo".
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
According to several strong sources and studies:
Goldfish, if they were larger, could survive well on land and very possibly contend with humans for a dominant position on earth. Several experiments have shown goldfish working together in gang-like groups. These groups have all the typical functions of a human gang including initiations, rumbles, developing a life or death loyalty and even drug operations among marine animals. It is not doubt that goldfish could take over the world...?
While it is obvious and quite dated knowledge that the sheer size of a brain is no indicator for "intelligence" (let us avoid the discussion what intelligence is in the first place for the moment), it is provably wrong that dolphins just do what they are "conditioned" to do. There have been many experiments that show that dolphins are capable to do a lot more than just demonstrate conditioned reflexes, including understand a several-word sign language and coming up with what could be called creative solutions.
Nothing of that sort has been demonstrated for goldfish yet, but that does not mean it cannot be done, just that we simply do not know yet.
It has been shown for other species that they show surprisingly intelligent behaviour when trained and it is probably impossible to defined what "more intelligent" should mean for non-humans (it is already quite arbitrarily defined for humans). So the bottom line is - more animals are more intelligent than most people think. And dolphins have shown a quite surprising range of abilities that was not observed in any other marine animal yet.
Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
Oh come on, you can't possibly believe this bullshit.
Manger's views are sure to cause a stir among a public which has long associated dolphins with intelligence, emotion and other human-like qualities.
Dolphins have emotions because they are mammals and because their brains have a certain structure, not because their brains are a minimum size.
Absolute brain size is largely determined by body size--more muscles means you need more brain mass.
Finally, except for a general trend, there is no conclusive data about a firm relationship between brain-to-body-mass ratio or neuron count to intelligence. The way to determine whether animals are intelligent is to observe and test their behavior.
Personally, I find it pretty smart that dolphins don't "jump out of their bowl to explore the environment"; for an aquatic animal of any kind, that seems like a survival trait to me...
Now all we need to do is to develope tiny lasers to attatch to the fish. Of course, this means we need to advantage in nanotechnology. And although sharks aren't dolphins are mentioned in this article, I believe goldfish would be better recruited to go on attack missions in our oceans in order to protect America and establish a New World Order, as Bush demands.
meanwhile in the ocean:
Flipper: Oh, look a delicious looking fish, Yum!
A few seconds later.... *BOOM*
#23: Delude humans. Check.
:-)
You guys have obviously already forgotten about the mice then?
= Ch =
Insert
So, was Douglas Adams wrong in his famous trilogy of five?
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
So goldfish are able to jump out of their bowls... but what we really need to know in order to sort this out is can they run Linux?
Has anyone seen the MythBusters episode where they train some goldfish to follow a path from one end of the tank to another? Just thought I'd mention, kindof disproves their "3 second memory". Supprised no-one has mentioned yet.
if dolphins were so smart, why are they caught up in drift gillnets all the time?
eric cartman (renowed scientist).
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
before making silly comments:
www.janusonis.net/docs/manger2006.pdf
It's quite long. I' no expert in this field, but I think it is difficult to refute some of the things he mentions in this review. I'm not so impressed by the allometric stuff of brain says and neuron numbers, but I was unaware of the fact that there is little good evidence (according to the paper at least) for a sophisticated language system.
1. Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans). This is related to their extremely complex social structures, which implies high intelligence. And this is just one area in which dolphins seem to show high intelligence.
2. Glia are no longer considered 'noncomputational' by neuroscientists. Recent research seems to show that glia, and not just neurons, may perform computational tasks. This is highly controversial at present, but we are far from being able to say that just because an animal has lots of glia that that does not indicate a potential for high brain functions.
People dumber than fish have been known to become presidents....
eTrade SUCKS
Another task is identifying unauthorized swimmers (likes Islamic terrorists) seeking to enter a harbor where naval warships are anchored.
Indeed, however I hear so far they can only identify the islamic terrorist swimmers if they happen to be carrying some falafel.
He comes across as one of those people looking to attract publicity. It's rather simple - overstate your findings in order to be provocative.
It doesn't matter if dolphins are not _quite_ as smart as we thought. They still have some sort of language, and they still are able to communicate with humans in a more sophisticated manner than most mammals.
Stop the brainwash
Dolphins get trapped in nets because they can't detect them, not because they're too stupid to know what to do. Aside from the obvious fact, as someone else has already pointed out, that a goldfish that jumps out of it's bowl and dies isn't nessearily very smart, there are could also be complex psychological factors at play as to why dolphins might not attempt to escape.
Dolphins are one of the few creatures that play games, such as playing tag with a peice of seaweed, or blowing bubble rings. This type of behaviour is often an indicator of high intelligence. To say that a Dolphin isn't much smarter than a Goldfish is an insult to both Dolphins and any human with half a brain to realise this article is a crock.
After seeing this video, I certainly changed my opinion of goldfish, although I don't know if it's real.
z ed-swimming-goldfish.html
http://whatthepets.blogspot.com/2006/01/synchroni
However it did remind me of "Skinner" by Neal Asher and his comments on dolphins.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
...they're just assholes.
I disagree that jumping out of ones environment is a smart move, especially if you don't know what's on the other side. I disagree that dolphins are dumb because they get caught in nets because: a) how do you jump over a net if you find your self in the absolute center? b) maybe most do 'just jump over' and the ones caught are the dumb few. c) if a dolphin doesn't jump over a net it will become sushi, a dolphin probably doesn't know that it should jump over a net unless it knows it's dangerous, if a dolphin knows the net is dangerous - it's probably already been caught (see sushi statement). d) nets (i think) are designed to be fairly invisible, dolphins aren't known for having excellent eyesight and I don't know if their echo location is good enough to spot a net... Let's have a fish off and stick a dolphin and a goldfish in a tank and see who wins... actually to make it fair lets stick quite a few goldfish in there...
This research
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45360
"I am German, it is vot ve do"
I couldn't agree more
How else can you explain why the dolphins are trying to tell us the Earth is about to be destroyed by a group of grumpy wannabe poets?
\
But you can't fit frickin' lasers on goldfish, they sink right away. :(
Clearly it was a slow news weekend. This report got a ton of coverage, which seems unwarranted given some of the abitrary standards of "intelligence" put forward by the researchers. The Wikipedia article on dolphin intelligence provides a far better balanced view of the subject.
I had a quick look at the University of the Witwatersrand website. Dr. Manger is a lecturer at the School of Anatomical Sciences. He is not an animal behaviorologist.
While Dr. Manger is no doubt qualified to discuss the structure of a dolphin's brain, he is in no better qualified to draw conclusions about dolphin intelligence than any of us here on Slashdot. Perhaps this explains some of his eccentric statements, or why his opinions contrast so sharply with other research indicating a high level of social complexity in dolphin behavior.
That Dr. Manger's study is "peer-reviewed" is really neither here or nor there, since peer review usually occurs within an author's specialty and Manger's most controversial findings transcend his field.
Dr. Manger's comment that dolphins should be smart enough to jump out of tuna nets would seem simply bizzare if they weren't so outright callous.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
The only comparable goldfish dish is too much like Whitebait.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Glial cells apparently aren't really just placeholders and heaters. Scientific American ran a really good article a while back called "Did Scientists Miss Half the Brain?". (There is what appears to be a summary at this location.) It details a modern understanding of brain structure, which has overturned the former conception of glial cells as "just" structural elements supporting neurons. It would seem that glial cells can both sense and emit neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters can affect the operation of neurons. So linked to the electrochemical network we usually think of as the brain is another purely chemical one as well.
Also, even in humans, there is a "superabundance" of glial cells, in that there are approximately 10 glial cells for every neuron.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I couldn't disagree more. I too lament the ignorance level of the average American citizen and the sorry state of our government indoctrination camps, errrr... public schools.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
What is really disturbing about this story is not how wrong it is, but how it spread like wildfire through the echo chamber that is the web pages of the "respectable" news media. There seems to be zero interest in vetting stories anymore. Anything that sounds like a sensation and be linked to some other news page somewhere, is worth publishing, without a critical word added.
Back on topic, did you know that as far as we know, only three animals understand the concept of 'pointing at something'? These three are humans, chimpanzees and dolphins. Try it with your cat or dog. It will continue to look at your hand, not where you want it look, until the cows come home. Understanding symbols that stand for vectors in space require a greal deal of abstract thinking.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050606_dolp hinfrm.htm
A group of dolphins has learned to use tools, with mothers teaching their daughters how to do so. That's pretty damn smart.
Just goes to show that you shouldn't take every slashdotted article for its face value.
Sinking Titanic, Goldfish Memory, Trombone Explosion. Episode Number: 11 Season Num: 1M. Adam and Jamie had to train their goldfish to do race.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I think his arguments offer more convincing evidence of the researchers lack of intelligence, despite an abundance of neurons in his brain tissue. I suppose he would also describe people jumping out of windows as "enlarging their environment"? At the very least he seems blissfully unaware of research suggesting advanced language skills and self awareness in dolphins.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Thanks for ruining Seaquest DSV for me, now it's totally unbelievable
First of all, intellegence is not one dimensional. How do you say someone or something is smarter than someone else unless you use a scale that turns it into 1 dimension (e.g. IQ test).
Second, whose brain is made for information processing (whatever meaning that is)? Human brains can process language and certain visual stimulus like faces very well but it's not very good information processing since it can't remember anything correctly and can't do simple mathematical operations correctly. Plus, dogs have better sound and smell processing to go with the hardware/"wetware".
Oh come on, you can't possibly believe this bullshit.
He's a dolphin, he'll believe whatever the govt tells him.
Now, if he were a goldfish ...
The US Military announced their new weapon in the war on terror.
GOLDFISH WITH FREAK'N LASERS!
Bart and Lisa are doing some recycling of those plastic ring things that hold six-packs of beer together.
Lisa: And, you have to cut these up first. Otherwise, animals get caught in them.
Bart: Only the stupid ones.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Here's another tidbit of information. Look at the site hosting the information. It's "Aljazeera", the folks that want fundamentalism Muslims to suicide bomb every American interest, along with the Americans, in the middle east by pumping Anti-American propaganda throughout that region.
Those folks are talking about "Dolphins". What the fuck is this ? Fundamentalist religious freaks are talking about Dolphins. Give me a break.
So "reputable news source" my ass, not that I'm conservative, Fox News fan or anything like that. I'm certainly not.
geez
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Could you imagine Goldfish on a plane!? *shudder*
-- Henry
No, more like having really dood insulation in your home, period.
Open windows lose heat through radiation and convection.
The two holes would lose heat through radiation and conduction, much like the windows in a house do when closed.
Considering the variablity in water temperatures is far less than in air. Having read the article I would endeavor to say the man is an idiot (although I admit the possibility I am). Firstly he assumes that animals that have a fairly different set of inputs should have a brain structure like humans. Then, he puts forth the notion that an animal that jumps out of its enviroment and dies is more intelligent than ones that get caught in nets. This would appear to be analogous to the difference between humans being abducted by aliens, and humans catapulting themselves into space without life support.
On third thought, can someone please prove that I am an idiot? It would lbe preferable to trying to decipher how this got news coverage.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
It should have been translated properly to:
"So long, and thanks for all the flakes!"
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
TFA is from ... Al-Jazeera. Need I say more? That's a pretty big *bam* to your credibility right there.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Slashdot. News for Nerds, Junk Science that Matters.
Mother, may I?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Everyone knows the brain's only purpose is to cool the blood.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I think a troll has gotten under your gaurd. Surely we've been had. The whole article is a troll.
SeaWorld's new Goldfish Spectacular failed to impress visitors yesterday. After several hours of waiting for the fish to do backflips, leap through hoops, whistle recognizable tunes, or walk across the water on their tails, most of the crowd left in disgust. Despite assurances that the highly-trained goldfish were "just a little out of sorts today" and that tomorrow's performance would be more dramatic, few SeaWorld visitors seemed eager to attend the goldfish show. "They're just a bunch of dumb-ass goldfish," said Billy J, 6, "I want to see the dolphins!". Another visitor was similarly outspoken. "The best bit of the show was always when the chick in the bikini rides on the dolphin's back, but that really doesn't work with goldfish. They tried to cover it up, but I think she squeezed one of them to death between her thighs." observed the middle-aged man, who declined to give his name.
In Hollywood, executives at Warner Brothers were said to be reconsidering plot changes made to "Free Willy 4". Recent doubts about cetacean intelligence had led to the substitution of an extremely-large orange-red goldfish named Sunny for the film's iconic killer whale during principal photography but the poor reception of the SeaWorld performances might lead to another reversal. Director Simon Wincer criticized the new change of heart, claiming that a story about a twelve-year-old boy trying to liberate the goldfish from his bowl on the living room table has much more dramatic impact than the earlier movies. "Now that we know that whales are just big dumb mammals, you can't empathize with them any more," said Wincer. "But when Sunny jumps out of his bowl and lies gasping on the carpet, that's real tragedy. We're watching an intelligent creature just seconds away from death. There's no way we're going back to using killer whales now."
No highly-intelligent goldfish were harmed in the making of this report.
This time I am talking about your post. Aljazeera is not nearly as fundamentalist as e.g. Fox News, but even if it were, it would not automatically mean that a "science article" published there is nonsense.
2 0060819.LETTERS19-12/TPStory/Comment= 143&art_id=vn20060817031855765C442092l ?id=3d68da16-b7b1-4334-bf4d-aa9ebdd0f303&k=89468
Like every other news source, they get most of these articles from agencies that sell them.
So if you prefer to read that nonsense from a different source, go here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=14&click_id
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.htm
and probably hundreds more all over the internet.
Sweet, now does this mean we can finally get past them being cute? Does this mean i can start eating for the underdogs and get tuna safe dolphin meat?
http://www.totallycrap.com/videos/video_4_little_f ish
While dolphins may have big brains, laboratory rats and goldfish can outwit them
Well, we already knew that dolphins were only the second-most-intelligent lifeform on this planet, the white mice being the first.
The goldfish thing is news, though. Maybe goldfish are just really really specialized dolphins, and nobody's noticed yet?
In Carl Sagan's book 'Dragons of Eden', he links intelligence not with brain size, but with the ratio of brain size to body mass. He backs this up with some reasonable-seeming examples. I found a few here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm . Hm, except this makes mice out to be smarter than men. Explains the Douglas Adams worldview, I suppose.
It's a good read. He then goes on to analyze the Genesis story, and how the curse God inflicts on human females to endure painful childbirth after eating of the tree of knowledge is linked to the fact that our oversized noggins make the birthing process more difficult.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glial_cell
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Isn't it obvious that goldfish are smarter? They have been on the market and for sale MUCH longer than the dolphin crackers.
. asp
http://www.pepperidgefarm.com/fun_snacks_goldfish
Are these the same South African Scientists that think HIV/Aids can be cured with garlic and olive oil. I heard one on the radio the other day saying that just because western scientists had made scientific discoveries didn't made them valid in South Africa.
Obviously that applies to brains and dolphins too.
I met a South African school teacher who lost her job teaching Maths to a year 10 graduate, because they'd decided to give over all the teaching jobs to black people. Never mind if they're qualified, skilled or appropriately trained. Fortunately NZ was happy to give the qualified teacher a job.
So I expect more stupid stuff out of South Africa on a regular basis. Lots of them are getting Darwin awards - they might not believe his white-fella science but he's proven right by them every day.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Clearly it was a slow news weekend. This report got a ton of coverage
and have you noticed the number of moderation points used / posts on this story? now *that's* that I call a slow start for this week.
But then I remembered I had just read this story.
Goldfish don't wear Speedos. At least that's one indication they are smarter than dolphins.
But why is the rum gone?
Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Communication of food location between human and dog (Canis familiaris). Evolution of Communication, 2, 137-159.
Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (1999). Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) use human and conspecific social cues to locate hidden food. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 113, 173-177.
Goldfish are also smarter than Paul Manger of Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.
...and thanks for all the fish
"Fix it"
They have shown that dolphins have pattern recognition, the ability to learn and to anticipate the next part of a sequence. Dolphins have a language in which they commnicate with others of thier species. They have complex social structures. They can solve puzzles, they can be trained to do complex tasks.
I'm not saying that they're as smart as me, but they are at least as smart as other higher order animals, and certainly smarter than my goldfish who keeps trying to commit suicide.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Okay, I smell a rat here. Or a fish. I saw seaQuest DSV - dolphins can hold increasingly complex conversations with humans about a variety of abstract and unlikely topics! Try and use Lucas's oversized yellow remote control thing to talk to a goldfish, and see just how far you get!
The Mythbusters taught Goldfish how to navigate a maze, and found the Goldfish remembered how to navigate the maze two weeks later.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
And thanks for all the fish
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Just to add on. I remember watching this in the Discovery Channel. Most people assumed that the dolphins are intelligent and friendly such that when boats sail in the ocean, they swim alongside the boat or even in front of the boat just to mingle with their human friends. However, this was not the *real* reason. Apparently, they noticed that there are a bunch of smaller, baby dolphins swimming in the opposite direction away from the boat, while those that mingle with the humans are the adult dolphins. This can be seen that the adults are distracting the humans while their youngs can swim off to a safer place. Such altruistic behaviour is hard to find in the aquatic world.
w00t
This has got to be some of the worst logic ever. For one, the goldfish would die, that doesn't make it smart, it makes it stupid.
And for dolpins not to escape, could be argued that they're smart enough to know they have an easy life where they are in the fully staffed spa of luxury. Who'd want to leave?
I think from the article, that Dolphins are even more intelligent than the so called scientist that came up with this theory.
On a side note, anyone find it odd that this is report in Aljazeera?
by Jesus IS the Devil (317662)
So to be clear. If you believe Jesus is the devil, and the devil believes in God, then you must believe in God?
I know that Human being and fish can coexist peacefully.
Especially after evidence on dolphins' intelligence provided by various studies and documentaries. I doubt a goldfish can match that.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
who is going to be developing the mini-lasers that will be mounted on the mice and goldfish?
I'll test one in the lab with our 7 Tesla magnet.
results will be posted tomorrow
...just not within their heads. They remember stuff by reading and writing scent trails on the ground - using the world as their personal hard drive. Lots of little creatures do this, even e.g. slugs.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans).
Elephants also have this, and so (probably) do (some) dogs. Again, these are the animals with the complex social structures.
But honestly, please don't underestimate elephants. They can think, and alone among the non-primates they have hands.
Well, trunks.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Carp (eg goldfish) live in an environment in which jumping from one body of water to another offers a real chance of accessing a new environment, e.g. a new pond or stream. It also offers the ONLY chance of survival for carp trapped in small, evaporating puddles of water, which may well be how goldfish register their surroundings.
By contrast, a dolphin has only a fairly low chance of being able to jump into a whole new ocean. A zero chance, in fact.
Therefore, the tendency to jump may be more a reflection of the chance that jumping will do a given creature any good, rather than a sign of intelligence.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The standardized tests are human-centric. If the standardized tests had dolphin-oriented questions on them, the dolphins would do a lot better. (Yah blatantly stolen from the Upright Citizens Brigade heh heh heh)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This Paul Manger dude doesn't know what he's talking about. Dolphins have the approximate intelligence of your average 3-5 year-old. Most of their neurons are dedicated to process their sonar. Moreoever, I know from first-hand experience, these animals have personalities, and relationships with their handlers, and other dolphins. All of these functions come from higher-order places in the brain, and BTW, Dolphins aren't just for jumping through hoops.
I like Google as much as the next guy but, just as with a certain other excellent reference, you can "prove" just about ANYTHING by taking a few lines out of their context...
There are even several breeds of dogs called pointers which specialise in this.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Ok. It's very well documented that a lot of papers are just as good as toilet paper. I'd add this one too....
a tv show called "Goldie", rather than flipper?
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
In high school one of our labs involved dropping various substances (alchohol, taurine, caffeine, etc) on the gills of goldfish and watching them swim around afterwords. I felt terrible doing it even though they are just fish, but the teacher assured us they wouldn't have a clue and wouldn't even remember it. LIES!
You know, the (perhaps apocryphal) stockbrokers jumping out of buildings because they realized that they were bankrupt. Using your monkey logic, does that prove that human beings aren't any more intelligent than goldfish?
Social intelligence actually would dictate that the self-aware individual might sacrifice itself for the good of the whole so jumping out of the tank could be an entirely conscious (or subconscious) decision in the same way that the Wall St. leap was. Go figure.
They get herded into bags and covered in cheddar.
Mmmm Golfish... mmmm...
This
All over the article are the words "Manger says" but nowhere does it say "Evidence shows" or anything along those lines... Sounds like someone in South Africa is trying to get some publicity to me... They should have just said they found a goldfish that looks like the virgin Mary.
Yeah, friendly and intelligent on rye bread.
First of all: goldfish are not two inch long fish you keep in a half gallon glass bowl. Those are baby fish that are fated to die drinking their own piss. Goldfish are properly pond fish like koi. They aren't nearly as big as koi, but when full grown they can be over a foot long and quite active and beefy. I have a 55 gallon tank, and if I were to stock it with goldfish, there would only be room for one, maybe two with considerable effort and skill applied.
Keeping mature goldfish is reputed to be like keeping dogs -- the fish recognize individuals and respond to them.
Goldfish, like koi, are carp, which are members of the Cyprinid family of fishes. Cyprinids include many species that are well known in the aquarium hobby: danios, rasboras, barbs etc. Many of these species are popular because they are active and considered highly intelligent.
I cycled my tank (established a colony of beneficial waste recycling bacteria) using a school of White Clouds, a cyprinid minnow about an inch long and closely related to rasboras. White clouds are attractive,active, peaceful little fish that are extremely hardy and good for this purpose (incidentally a much better candidate for "goldfish bowls" than goldfish, provided you're committed to daily water changes). They are also astonishingly intelligent.
My White Cloud school mostly patrolled the top third of my tank, snatching food from the surface or as it sank slowly. After several months, I introduced a pair of Corydoras -- a tiny armored cat fish -- to the the tank. Catfish of course are bottom feeders, and are constantly foraging in the gravel. When my White Clouds saw this, they started foraging in the gravel too. Their mouths point upward for snatching food from the surface, so they have to turn over on their backs to do it.
Clearly, this is not "instinctive" behavior. They saw and learned. With a brain that I doubt amounts to more than a cubic millimeter in volume.
The behavior of these fish are interesting; you need to keep a largish school to see the full range. Somewhere around eight or nine fish, suddenly you see a completely different set of behaviors emerge. Clearly they are intelligent fish despite their tiny size, but much of that intelligence comes out when there are enough fish for them to feel comfortable and confident.
Later I introduced some Danios to the tank, which changed the schooling behavior of the White Clouds. Danios, who are supposedly relatively peaceful and playful, have strong hierarchies in which the strongest fish (usually the most irridescent) claim territories. The "playful" behavior, if you watch closely, consists of the strongest fish chasing the next strongest fish out of his territory, and so on down the line. White Clouds aren't hierarchical, but they apparently look enough like danios to get chased. In my tank, the strongest danio cruised a territory consisting the top half foot of water and about 1/3 the surface area of the tank. So the White Clouds started lurking as individuals or groups of two or three in out of the way places. After adding another pair of white clouds, the behavior of the school changed. A pair of the more robust White Clouds who had previously been lurking far from the aggressive danio began patrolling the edge of the his territory. When a weaker white cloud strayed into the danio's territory and the danio attacked, they'd dart in to nip at his flanks. After a few days of this the danio's territory shrunk so that the White Clouds could school like they used to.
Instinctive behavior? In this case, certainly. The point is that these fish have evolved to school in hostile environments; evolution provided them with highly capable brains for the task of survival, depsite their small size. Furthermore, schooling is more than just huddling together to reduce the risk of predation to an individual in the school, these fish have social behaviors that strengthen the school. This means that there are signals, and coordination, and a
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Training critters with a 3 second attention span isn't that hard. After all, do you think the American education system would be as effective as it is if we couldn't train our kids?
This is not a scientific paper. I don't know what a "bioethologist" is, but it's not a biologist, and it's not a neurologist, and I don't think that jsut because someone was published in some scholary journal makes them an expert on everything.
The artical claims that dolphins have "very few" neurons. Well, how many do they have? How does that compare to the number in other, supposedly smarter animals? They claim that dolphins won't jump out of the water to escape from nets, but where's the proof? No research has been done. No science has been done. The artical is just a bunch on meaningless, unsubstantiated claims.
so we have to see badly made 3D goldfishs in videos and on covers for Techno/Ambient music for the next 10 years?
I don't think real dolphin researchers are going to take this any more seriously than virologists take claims by other South African "scientists" who claim that AIDS isn't caused by HIV.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Those brains weren't "designed", they got lucky enough to suit their changing environment enough to be naturally selected. As oceans start to change dramatically due to the Greenhouse (including coral reef extinction), we'll see just how smart humans are to survive with our own environment leaving us behind, while dolphins use their big brains to save their own skins.
Meanwhile remember that human brains evolved in response to the "Rift Valley" shift in Africa about 11 million years ago. West of the East African Rift the forest stayed mostly the same, evolving our primate cousins largely under competition pressure. East of the Rift, across the South Asian subcontinent, the forests rose up, cooled off, thinned out. Our ancestors evolved first to walk upright across resulting grasslands between small copses of trees. We managed to learn to use our freed up hands in the more varied, less protected environment. Using tools was the side effect that changed everything.
Who's to say that dolphins can't use their brains to cope with a changing environment better than humans will? We might face a future in which our descendants are fortunate to survive in dry undersea bubbles, dolphins feeding us pizza to watch us do tricks like light a cigarette and talk with each other.
--
make install -not war
"...a goldfish that jumps out of it's bowl and dies isn't nessearily very smart, there are could also be complex psychological factors at play as to why dolphins might not attempt to escape."
Yes, I think dophins identify with their captors. We should run an experiment comparing their brains to Patty Hearst's.
--Now aside from the feeling disgusted thing, the real problem starts when those feelings lead to a feeling of superiority as that often prevents further rational discourse. (That is, even if later the original claim turns out to hold merit, the observer's ego fights to prevent any learning or adaptation to such an idea.) Indeed, it often leads instead to bitterness and irrationality.
So are dolphins smart? I've never really taken much interest in the idea, so I don't know. Mostly, I've only seen them on television, which means I know next to nothing personally on the subject.
However, it does appear to be universally understood that Goldfish and other amphibians have no neocortex, whereas dolphins do. There are arguments, from the same people who claim Dolphins are stupid, for why their particular neocortex is no big deal, but having briefly perused those ideas, it seems to me that they are reaching a little much. Yes, it is true that marine mammals are different than land mammals in terms of brain structure, but dolphins are still mammals; they feed their young on mother's milk, they are able to defend against predators using pack tactics and they understand the concept of play. --Such behaviors simply don't happen in the cortex-only reptilian/amphibian world. So I'm thinking that maybe the evolutionary addition of the neocortex in the dolphin might indeed be relevant.
As for intelligence in terms of problem solving. . . I've gotten myself lost in a simple bush-maze which I'm sure a rat could have found its way through easily enough proving, I guess, that I don't like cheese enough to sufficiently motivate me to solve a dumb puzzle.
-FL
had twice the normal amount of glia cells compared to human average. He had the same amount of neurons. Glia cells make neurons more efficient which translates to a smarter brain.
"Seem to" is the right word, indeed. It's MUCH easier to antropomorphise a dolphin than a goldfish. They're mammals, they make sounds, have big heads, and they have the most important characteristic: eyes fairly similar to human eyes. They look intelligent, which, since they aren't human, doesn't mean shit.
Can we please get over the myth that whales are so intelligent soon? "Flipper" and "Star Trek IV" did more to uneducate people than any amount of rational science. People want whales to be intelligent, but it's time to realise that it's just another (and tasty) animal.
I read an article in Scientific American about how dolphins play with each other or by themselves when they're bored. Older dolphins will teach younger ones how to generate complex vorticies in the water, and then inject them with air, making these weird stable rings that they can fool around with. I just googled for the info, and this story popped up. My goldfish are pretty clever for such little animals, I guess, but they certainly don't play like this.
Moreover, the hunting patterns of dolphins are considerably more complex and 'intelligent-looking' than those of goldfish. Dolphins are more social, sure, but it takes more than a bunch of friendly animals to realize that they can use fishing nets to hunt.
Brain size and composition have ALWAYS been a bad indicator of intelligence. If it were the case merely that a big brain was enough to be smart, we'd be badly outclassed. From human to human, we'd see fair differences in intelligence, just based on the size of the brain (assuming that most human brains are composed similarly, and by increasing size, we merely increase the number of cells making up that brain -- tell me if that assumption is terribly off). Obviously this isn't true.
Fact of the situation: we're REALLY bad at figuring out what makes intelligence and what makes the brain work at all. I don't buy that goldfish are smarter yet. One study or group of studies is insufficient to make me believe this in the face of the observable evidence of intelligence or lack thereof.
You may as well post an article about how scientists have discovered life on the moon and use the Weekly World News as a source.
CNN and FOX News are any better?
Come on. ALL major news sources are propaganda outlets. That's how it works. The problem only arises when people think that their own country's news agency are above corruption.
As for the article, I'm sure the guy interviewed really believes his studies. How does that reflect on Aljazeera? All they're doing is reporting on recent claims from academia. All newspapers report stupid science news. So what?
-FL
Slashdot editors will be replaced by the more intelligent neuron-sparse dolphins, and slashdot readers will continue to continue to have the sex life of a goldfish, spraying semen about the floor in the hopes of an unlikely fertilization.
Personally, when I hear something that sounds fairly reasonable from enough people, I tend to go with tentatively believing the story as told until I hear a better explanation otherwise. Amongst my courses in Math, Science, IT, English, etc, *shock and horror* nobody, it just happens that nobody mentioned the memory span of a goldfish, this not being a really critical piece of information. Now, of course, various more importance pieces of information I'd tend to take for more a grain of salt, but as goldfish memory span is hardly a life-or-death piece of information (unless I'm playing a trivia game or something along those lines) I might tend to accept it as credible.
Of course, in my case I've also had goldfish and they have a tendency to associate people with food, etc etc, indicating that their overall memory span is larger than 3s, enough that in long-term memory they can relate "large bipedal person = incoming food", but as no scientists or credible sources have contradicted that particular smidgeon on information, I'd be happy to accept that they have have a rather limited short-term memory (heck, I've met people with about a 5-10s memory/attention-span).
Oh, and there's no snopes article on this subject either, at least not that I could find.
Seriously though, at some people, depending on the import of a given piece of information, it makes sense to accept what is largely held to be true (again, until properly-presented contradictory fact is presented). If a dozen people tell me that they've heard "Dave's Electronic's" is having a big sale on Saturday, I'll probably look forward to getting some cheap toys unless a "Dave's" employee tells me otherwise.
Another article on the same topic:
article
Dolphins have been known to jump over nets in the open ocean.
See here for another discussion of the article in question.
other forum
What exactly IS intelligence?
Goldfish sometimes jump out of their bowls.
Humans sometimes vote for George Bush.
Dolphins get caught in nets.
There are documented cases of people with normal I.Q's whose brains are 90% fluid.
Until we know a lot more about the brain, such pronouncements as "dolphins are stupid" are exactly that.
Dolphins don't jump out of their "water bowl" because they know it's a stupid thing to do. Aljazeera?
Am I the only one amazed at the fact that a peer reviewed article from the scientific community suggests, whether intentional or not, that the brain of a dolphin was designed and not a product of evoltion?
Chalk up a minor victory for the ID crowd.
Actually, I'm not sure by what criterion would you rule that as rare, since most mammals play games of some sort or another. (With the exception of some domesticated ones, e.g., cattle, which have some millenia behind them of artifficially selecting the dumbest and most passive ones.) It's a form of training for life, and a built-in way of calibrating how "in shape" the animal must be.
E.g., cats. I've yet to see a cat for any reasonable length of time which didn't play games. And I don't just mean following a feather-onna-string moved by a human. All our cats were perfectly able to initiate playing with, say, a stuffed kitten doll or teddy bear, and practice wrestling with it. (In fact, they seemed to "anthropomorphise" it, or rather the feline equivalent of the word. I.e., treat it as a cat. The way they wrestled it resembled cat wrestling, not the quick kill attacks you can observe in cats hunting prey. And the number of wrestling sessions the teddy bear lasted indicated that they avoided using their claws and teeth too much, again, just like when play-wrestling another cat. They could have dismembered it within minutes if they had wanted to.) Or they've been known to either try fetching a toy to us as a "come play with me" signal, or try to draw the humans' attention to the toy where it was.
E.g., dogs. My parents' dog and pretty much any dog I've seen occasionally plays some game or another. E.g., they're trivial to get to play fetch. My parents' dog also occasionally do stuff like try to enact his own fetch game, by himself. He'd occasionally bump the rubber ball with his nose, for example, and then chase it. Of course that didn't go that great, since he never bumped it fast or far enough. Or he'd just bring the ball to one of us humans and try to get us to play with him and that ball.
E.g., rabbits. Yeah, lowly herbivores and not that big a brain either. Yet if you observe them in open spaces, they basically play tag with each other. Often they take turns at who's playing the aggressor coming at various angles, and who's the one running away.
So basically if playing games is signs of high intelligence, then you've classified most mammals (and a good number of birds too) as highly intelligent. It doesn't leave that many which aren't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm trying to fill a Helpdesk Technician job and I was convinced that the best resume I had was from a guy about whom I had just commented had the intelligence of a below-average dolphin. It is now clear that the better candidate is the goldfish in the aquarium outside my office.
Yes, I'm sure the dolphins can smell your religious belief. After all, some people might consider a Navy SEAL to be a Christian terrorist. Wouldn't want the dolphins to attack them.
Perhaps you meant simply "terrorist", as in:
...I'm not saying that they're as smart as me, but they are at least as smart as other higher order animals, and certainly smarter than my goldfish who keeps trying to commit suicide.
You have actually proven that your goldfish has reached such a level of cerebral development that it has emotional problems of such sophistication that it has determined that the after-life is the better alternative to its current condition.
Nu-uh, scientists are stupid.
Hard to believe nobody has posted this yet, but the direct link to the study is here.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of course, people who were killed by dolphins don't get to tell their story to the newspaper.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As far as I have heard, CSM is a reliable source in spite of its name. I find it interesting that we'll automatically assume aljazeera.net isn't, because of its name.
Hmmm, goldfish jumping out of the bowl. I've never had one do that, and I had lots of them when I was a kid. In fact, I've never seen a goldfish bowl with a lid, just aquariums. And most of the aquariums I've seen (all I can remember) have something other than just goldfish in them (if they have any goldfish at all).
Dolphins not jumping out of nets. Seems wierd to us, but then again, we don't live in an utterly alien environment that is comprised of 3 dimensional travel (we use a planar travel, even if that plane wraps over 3d topography), non-circumventable spacial interruptions (like the shore), and a transition plane of a life sustaining resource that must be intermittently visited to resupply on a regular and continuous basis(air, they need air, and it's on the edge of their environment). Let's face it, an alien six legged methane breather from Regulus Prime may be easier for us to talk with and comprehend than a cetacian.
Glial cells. Well, the current research shows that they aren't just environmental regulators. They are part of the processing hardware. Funny thing that, we still don't really understand how the brain (human or otherwise) actually works, especially on the creation/existence of intelligence. This guy is throwing darts blindfolded and he forgot to put the flights on. (Darts term, look it up.)
Even though we don't understand how the brain and intelligence actually work, we can identify certain types of intelligent activity that shows forethought and reasoning. My favorite dolphins have an intelligence report is from a scientist that was testing them for responses. She'd give them a treat when they whistled in a pitch she could hear, but not for any others, even though her instruments showed her the ultrasonic whistles. It wasn't long before one of the dolphins popped up and proceeded to go through his vocal scale from one end to the other. After that, the dolphins in that tank would only use tones she could hear when they knew she was around.
Brains. Even though we understand so little (still - frustrating isn't it), once you've removed the quantity needed to operate the body, whatever is left is going to be used for memory and whatever kind of processing it needs. So if you look at a dolphin brain, and subtract the parts we believe are needed for standard biology, and even if you then extract the glial cells, you still end up with more brains left than an entire goldfish (scales and all). Heck, even if you remove the section we believe is used for their echolocation processing, that's still true. (And that's a big chunk.) Just going by a cell ratio clearly isn't enough to make the suppositions he's made (as specified in the news article).
So what's this guys deal? Is he trying to re-open whaling by claiming all cetacians are stupid? Or did he accidentally submit his 4 year olds homework for publishing. If so, didn't the crayon marks give them a clue?
I don't usually post here, and I probably wont be checking back on this topic, but in defense of the dolphins, let me point out a few facts.
Keep in mind that that I am mainly talking about tursiops here; other species are vastly different in intelligence, social structure, physiology, etc.
Firstly, let's remember that Einstein's brain had a higher glia cell ratio than most. Yes, that means that one of our smartest people had fewer neurons. And oh by the way, the notion that glia cells are inactive cells is utterly obsolete. Glia cells preform support functions, such as immunity (the body's regular immune system is excluded by the brain-blood barrier), and I think I remember something about them being somewhat active in the neural network itself. Scientifically, we know the basics of the brain and its consciousness, but no where near enough to make statements on processing capability like those made by this slashdot post, as we do not really understand the dynamic properties of biological neural networks.
Someone pointed out that dolphins won't jump over very short dividers at marine parks. Well, they're usually trained not to, and the pools aren't always deep enough, particularly when the dolphin is awaiting instruction in a small enclosure during a show. Why don't you try leaping 10 feet out of a pool? That whole trick is only possible because their skin deforms at high speeds allowing a top speed of 28km/h - it's not that easy to do, even for them. Btw, I had a dog who could easily have just walked over the little boards we put where we didn't want him to go, but he never went over them after we taught him not to. And dolphins have long ago been absolutely proven smarter than canines.
In any case, they have been shown to overcome a variety of barriers far more complicated to get through.
"The dolphin's brain is not made for information processing it is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a mammal in water."
Excuse me? Thermal challenges? This goes back to Aristotle's ignorant theory that the brain was merely a radiator of some kind. No sir, that doesn't hold up. Dolphins keep warm with that thick layer of blubber which also convinently protects them from impacts. They can cool themselves through their fins, although cooling is obviously less of a problem, cooling is the way temperature is kept within specific bounds. I think it's also worth pointing out that dolphins have a high metabolic rate and a linear digestive track.
Having a brain solely to make heat is just wasting energy. Mammals don't need a "furnace" like that, if they did dolphins would have a bad case of muscle spasms or something. Why do you think you shiver when it's cold outside?
As for goldfish being smarter than dolphins... well what data supports that?
Let's list just a few things goldfish aren't so famous for:
1) A fluid, highly sophisticated social matrix.
2) Signature whistles and at least 30 or so known communication whistles (actually about 70 have been recorded though).
3) Sentence-structured lexigram comprehension, as scientifically proven by Akeakamai.
4) The most sophisticated sensorimotor system in the entire animal kingdom. Vision and echolocation are used in tandem, giving the advantages of both - vision for fast wide angle use, and echolocation for just about everything we can't see, including what's inside and too far away underwater - and oh, by the way, wild dolphins will recognize a pregnant human female and often move to protect her. They can swim almost immediately after birth which is important because dolphin calves sink until they get enough body fat to float - that's like a human newborn getting up and walking off. Without going into too much detail and angering moderator staff, both male and female dolphins can do fantastic things which demonstrate a level of voluntary control of their bodies beyond our own. Show me a goldfish that can do the equivalent of any of those things and I'll swim the English channel both ways with no breaks.
5) Quick learning
This article doesn't successfully demonstrate that goldfish are smarter than dolphins... (i.e., goldfish which demonstratably have very poor long term memory (though not all as bad as cliche lets us believe... while dolphins can communicate with humans, have intensely complex langauges of their own, etc) ... its proof that human beings don't fully (or even remotely) understand the brain yet!
Jerry Levy (one of my favorite psychologists) has an interesting theory about dolphins and how dumber they are then people expect. Intelligence tests do find that the big-brained dolphins are not anywhere near as clever as they ought to be judging by brain size.
Humans have a great big corpus collousum -- it keeps both hemispheres of the brain at the same activation level. When we sleep, both sides function in unison -- I think we're talking deep sleep, here, not REM, where the two hemispheres are both active.
Dolphins cannot sleep for long. They need to breath, which means coming up for air, and so the corpus callousum of the dolphin is small -- the two hemispheres do NOT have the same activation. One goes flat while the other stays active. Hence, the dolphin is only really effectively using about half his brain at any time.
And hence, the dolphin is only half as smart as you'd expect per the brain size.
That reminds me of another "conclusive" study that concluded that cats are colour-blind (in spite of having plenty of cones in their retina), because they seemed not to react to the colour cues they were given. Then later it turns out that cats _do_ see colours, and _can_ be taught to react to colour cues, they just don't normally assign that much importance to them. So it wasn't that the cat couldn't distinguish between "green dish" and "red dish", it's just normally it just saw it as "dish".
Now I'm not trying to discredit such studies as a whole, but we need to remember that until someone can talk to the cat, we just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. We can see their reactions, but the rationale behind that is at best just a wild uninformed guess.
Does it recognize itself in the mirror or not? Or maybe it just isn't that interested it itself? We just don't know what the cat sees or thinks there. And when you expect it to "use that information in some intelligent fashion", it gets even less clear.
Even we humans are only interested in mirrors because we're worried about our looks and about how other humans perceive us. Noone uses a mirror just to recognize themselves. They use it to see how they'll appear to others.
Elliminate that incentive or concern completely, and chances are even humans wouldn't give a damn about mirrors any more. If you dropped someone alone on a tropical island, Robinson Crusoe-like, with the knowledge that they won't see or be seen by another human ever again, then you'd probably find their interest in their own image or in mirrors dropping very fast. After his first weeks there, it's a pretty safe bet that Robinson Crusoe wouldn't use a mirror daily, or even bother combing his hair or shaving/trimming his beard any more. What for? Maybe he'd use it occasionally for a "man, how low have I fallen, I look like a savage" round of self-pity, but even then there's that concern again with image and what others would see him like.
A cat doesn't have such sense of fashion and looks. They don't have "is my haircut right for my big date with that cute orange tomcat" concerns. They have their rituals for interacting with other cats (e.g., to be accepted on another cat's territory), but none of those have anything to do with looks. When they wash themselves it's to stay clean (and even then only because the smell could alert the prey), but not out of a concern with looking right to other cats.
So basically a cat doesn't really have much use for its own image in a mirror. Or not in the same ways that a human would treat theirs. It might use it as a sort of a toy, it might pretend that that reflection is an imaginary other cat to play with (same as they can pretend that plush toys are either prey or another cat), etc. But taken in the human "oh, look, that's me" sense, it's just useless for any animal that doesn't care about its looks.
Hence I find it a bit silly to draw a broad conclusion like "cats don't recognize their image" or "cats have no notion of 'self'" just because it doesn't fit someone's anthropomorphic illusions. Because that's what it's about. Someone anthropomorphises the cat by expecting some human-type reactions from it. And the cat (predictably) doesn't react that way, because it's really a cat, not a small furry human.
But that's in the end all we know there: the cat doesn't react like we'd expect a human to. We don't know why, though. We don't really know what it saw or thought there. And like the coloured dishes experiment proved, our guesses can be awfully wrong there.
And I'll also go ahead and say that we also don't yet know what intelligence is, other than as some vague fuzzy concept. We're taking wild guesses and extrapolations based on what humans do, but there is no real proof that every animal would benefit from the same things. I.e., we're really anthropomorphising again, and judging animals not as much on whether they're intelligent at being, you know, a cat, but on how well they fit our "
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Or
They are just way too smart to be servile like some dumbass dolphin.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
As far as I have heard, CSM is a reliable source in spite of its name. I find it interesting that we'll automatically assume aljazeera.net isn't, because of its reputation.
There you go, I fixed that for you. No charge.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
I actually saw a demo of this on the discovery channel. The dolphins don't tag unauthorized swimmers. They tag whoever is in the water. And by identifying they mean pushing the nose to the swimmer's leg and a metal clamp will... clamp them.
:-)
The dolphins were also very capable of detecting and identifying underwater mines.
It was beyond impressive. Made me want to play Red Alert for a couple of hours.
Hate to tell the original poster, but goldfish are freshwater fish and would die in the ocean.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
How much money has the navy spent training goldfish? None. Without resources, what do you expect the goldfish to do?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Yeah, I think Aljazzera is a good source of reliable scientific news...
a) 100 milliseconds b) 200 milliseconds c) 300 milliseconds d) 400 milliseconds? Find Out for Free
If you recall Einstein's brain wasn't all that big, it's structural composition the differentiator (possibly)
I assume you're speaking of aljazeera's reputation in America. Do you think that this reputation is deserved?
-------
Incite and flee.
Without resources, what do you expect the goldfish to do?
Even with tons of resources, I'd expect them to die almost immediately upon being placed in the ocean. Even without the salt-water issue, goldfish could be the smartest animal in the world and they'd still have no way to impart information to their trainers.
It's like Stephen Hawking...without the vocalization equipment that allows him to interact with the rest of the world, he wouldn't be considered among the great minds of our generation.
Perhaps dolphins are so clever that no-one's caught them doing exactly that!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
?morf emoc eltsac cisalp looc taht did erehW !yeH ...ood ...ood ...ood
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Flipper" and "Star Trek IV" did more to uneducate people than any amount of rational science.
"Rational science" uneducates people?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
A far more interesting behaviour is when dolphins deliberately chase fish up onto river banks to die. The dolphins then use the river banks as a gigantic seafood buffet, picking what fish they want before rolling/sliding back into the water. So they certainly do make very good use of the beach...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I guess it is impossible to dock a navy ship in freshwater (such as Lake Michigan).
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"I guess this means that the Navy will start recruiting and training goldfish for those mine search and destroy missions."
This already have been done. Although, not from the Navy.
Super Goldfish:http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?ei=UTF-8&vid=8e
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Yes, goldfish have been known to jump out of their tank form time to time. I've had goldfish in a tank for years, no lid, and this has never happened.
Goldfish are dumb, trainable yes, but dumb.
Dolphins don't jump out of their tank, except durring tricks and such where they know they'll get food for it. Now, the fact that they don't jump out, IMHO, says nothing. If I were an aquatic creature, I'd like to think that jumping into the air would make me ralize "hey, there's no water here. I'm helpless. Note to self: dont jump out of tank" and be done with it.
Knowing that leaving the water could be dangerous, unless I had reason to leave (ie: something trying to eat me) I'd just assume stay put.
And of course, don't forget that dolphins are known to hold the head of a sick dolphin above water while it recovers. I don't know about the rest of you, but a creature showing complex community behaviors seems more intelligent to me than the schooling habbit of goldfish. Sure, it makes the goldfish harder to catch, but beyond that have you ever seen them work towards a common goal?
And lets not forget the fact that dolphins, if marked in some way, react strangely to the markings when they view themselves in a mirror (implying that they recognize their own reflection). Teach that to a goldfish.
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushism- fish.htm
To contrast with the 6 troll responses you've gotten, I'd like to say that it's pretty damn incredible of you to stick with your boyfriend after his stroke. Many lesser women would leave and find someone without disability. People will always go for the cheap "Slashdot users don't have significant others" joke, despite it's clear falsehood, but it's true that most of the world doesn't have a significant other who's as committed as you.
Good luck to both of you.
...or shall we say of goldfish and dolphins?
(and just because they have more neurons/body mass doesn't mean they know how to use it. just look at the US government.)
-----
"If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on." - Murphy's Law
Your sense of humour astounds me.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Most arachnides have only two or three neurons, and watch what complex things they can do with them... the webs they build, how they capture the trapped insects, how they feel the weather change.
Anyway, I think that it's more a matter of interconnections (synapses) than of the neurons' number.
42.
Anyone?
Anyone?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Glial cells are pretty important -- the only difference found in Einstein's brain over "normal" humans so far is that he had many more glia (compared to neurons) in the area that processes information from many other information sources. source: Wikipedia
. htm)
Also, rats in more highly enriched envionronments have higher glial counts than rats in more impoverished environments, and the ratios of glia to neurons progresses as you go up the evolutions (9 to 1) than any other animal -- it would be nice if the article discussed what the ratio of glia to neurons was in the dolphin so we could know if that still held true.
So far, glia are a sign of a highly active brain -- they provide metabolic support and many other functions:
1. They play an active role in establishing and maintaining the fundamental patterns of neuron circuits.
2. They produce growth and trophic factors, playing a key role in regeneration and plasticity.
3. Some play an active role in the formation of myelin which speeds impulse conduction. Myelinated fibers conduct more rapidly than unmyelinated fibers.
4. Some glial cells respond to rapid repair of myelin in demyelinating diseases such as MS and ALS.
5. Glial cells play a crucial role in immunological responses to various infections and toxic agents.
6. Glial cells increase in number when nerve cells grow with enrichment.
(from http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/diamond_einstein
Finally, if the glia in the dolphins are just a function of cold water, it would make much more sense to have the brain surrounded by a large layer of fat than the relatively more expensive (metabolically speaking) brain cells. Dolphins may not be so intelligent, but that would be beter proved through behavioral studies -- if the argument that they are dumber is that their brains are more like Einstein's in that they have a high glial cell count, that idea just doesn't seem to "hold water".
If dolphin's brains are not built for information processing, why the hell do they seem to do it so well? There is a lot of data out there to suggest that glial cells and the abundance of synaptic connections that they help create are the basis for intelligence, not necessarily neuron quantity. Maybe Douglas Adams was right... It goes Mice, Dolphins, Us.
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"Hey, you gotta hand it to those dolphins. They just wanted it more."
Guess they first have to downsize them first or make the goldfish bigger ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Although this is not strictly an intelligence-related observation, it is interesting to note that dolphins not only have acute eyesight but also echolocation abilities. Dolphins emit sound waves and from the reflection of these sound waves, they perceive the objects in their environment inside out.
Imagine looking for a potential mate and perceiving candidates inside out so that you know how strong the bones are, for example. How cool is that.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
Dolphins are predators. Humans are made of meat. Sharks eat humans. Dolphins seldom attack humans, at least as far as we know.
So:
Hypothesis one: they realize that eating humans is a losing game.
Hypothesis two: they attack humans all the time but seldom get caught.
Niven points out that either way it's evidence of intelligence.
But not smart enough to avoid the big tank at PetSmart apparently . . . .
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
"We equate our big brain with intelligence. Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,"
Well I'm beginning to question my own intelligence 'cause I can't seem to find "our" big collecitve brain.
Huh. And you probably ate in a fish restaurant too.
Was it that one that looked like a cool plastic castle?
...and thanks for all the goldfish!
I'll be making appearances all week. Tickets are free, but they'll rape you on the drinks.
TFA is from Al Jazeera. Is it not possible that this propaganda is intended to undermine and misdirect our valiant military R&D effort?
OTOH, it seems obvious that goldfish are smarter than dolphins. I've never found a goldfish in a can of tuna.