It's kind of ironic that when you look at the evidence of intelligence and so on, a lot of it is anecdotal. A lot of it is, "Well, we saw this dolphin do this extraordinary thing," or, "We screwed up with our apparatus, and then the dolphins did this." And so it seems to me that the more we can actually watch them doing their thing, the better chance we'll have of making some sense of them.
Hal WhiteheadWhat I mean is, if you look at the behavior of an animal and ask, "Well, why did it do that?" and then consider the alternatives, those alternatives probably wouldn't be as successful at getting its genes around.
Hal WhiteheadThe real controversy comes with anthropologists - not all, but some - who see themselves as studying culture, and they then see culture from the perspective of humans, which is what they study. From their perspective, or, from some of their perspectives, it's sort of heresy to even talk about culture in any other animal. Others would say, "Yeah, you can talk about it, but our definitions of culture are so utterly different from yours and include things like values, and so on, which you've never shown to exist in any of these other creatures."
Hal WhiteheadStudying the behavior of large whales has been likened to astronomy. The observer glimpses his subjects, often at long range; he cannot do experiments, and he must continually try to infer from data that are usually inadequate.
Hal WhiteheadWhen I'm out in the ocean and I watch a seabird, I think, "Oh, I probably I know what that seabird is doing" - and I don't study seabirds. And the same for the turtles and on and on. But with the whales, a lot of the time, I have no idea what they're doing, and they're the ones I study.
Hal WhiteheadReligion's pretty pervasive in humans. And why it's pervasive in humans is debated a lot. There are indications of things that look like religion in other animals, like chimps doing rain dances, and that sort of thing. Actually, I say that, but there's that and not much else.
Hal WhiteheadIt's kind of ironic that when you look at the evidence of intelligence and so on, a lot of it is anecdotal. A lot of it is, "Well, we saw this dolphin do this extraordinary thing," or, "We screwed up with our apparatus, and then the dolphins did this." And so it seems to me that the more we can actually watch them doing their thing, the better chance we'll have of making some sense of them.
Hal Whitehead