[Everyone gasps.]

Leela: Dolphin? But dolphins are intelligent.

Bender: Not this one. He blew all his money on instant lottery tickets.

Fry: OK.

Leela: Oh, OK.

Amy: That’s different.

Farnsworth: Good, good.

Leela: Pass the blowhole.

Amy: Can I have a fluke?

Hermes: Hey, quit hogging the bottle-nose.

Farnsworth: Toss me the speech centre of the brain!

Simius #30
Marconi is a REALLY weird spelling of Nikola Tesla.. the inventor of the Radio
-> Glad someone else said it before I did!

Sweeper #31 (and related comments by Lyndale #34)
Where an animal has a bigger brain than would be expected simply from looking at its body-size, it’s a fair assumption that the animal is more intelligent than the average animal. Google EQ (Encephalisation Quotient).

-> Brain size or body ratio is not an indicator of intelligence. This was part of the concept of “Social Darwinism,” a racial fallacy FIRMLY debunked during the early 1800s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniometry#Cranial_capacity.2C_races_and_19th-20th_century_scientific_ideas

->Dolphins are not quintessential examples of peaceful intelligence. Think of them more like a lion pride than a pot-smoking hippie.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3323070/Killer-dolphins-baffle-marine-experts.html

->And since we’ve now considered dolphins in the context of a group working together for a less than noble pursuit, check out the next link. I couldn’t find the article I remembered in a published print thingy, so I had to settle on the academic paper that the article referenced. Probably better that way :)
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro04/web1/eberdan.html

Yep. Dolphins rape and in fact gang bang young females.

** “Never trust an animal that smiles all the time.” -Terry Pratchett, referring to dolphins.

The reason the brain/body ratio matters is simple: An animal the size of a whale has how much surface area on their body? Does this surface area have tactile feeling (sense of touch)? Those nerves don’t all report back to a single neuron in the brain. Thus a large brain is not necessarily indicative of intelligence. That’s where the ratio comes in. A great white shark is a large creature, but its brain is small for its size.

Technology is often developed out of necessity. We would likely not have computers today if there had not been a need to be able to do complex math work to make other things we needed (or perceived we needed) decades ago. Then again, this hinges on the standard idea of technology being things (items).

Intelligence is a murky subject that we don’t even understand. We have no universal definition for what constitutes intelligence. What is funny is the language bias in perceiving intelligence. Too often people assume that others who can’t understand their language are less intelligent. As far as it stands right now, it seems that intelligence is similar to art (or was it pornography? or was it obscenity?): people can’t define it, but they think they know it when they see it.

2) MEAT is tasty :D

3) Its silly to ask why whales don’t have roads. They wouldn’t use a road even if they had them. However, it is more telling to ask why they cannot communicate better. I’m not a “whale-o-logist” or anything so I do speak from ignorance to that degree. I would assume that higher intelligence would be able to communicate higher level of ideas to us and as far as i know, no animal has ever communicated anything higher than instinctual needs/desires…food/sleep/hunger/mate, etc.”[/quote]

Well that’s only applicable to human understandings of animals’ reasons to communicate. It is possible that they are so much more intelligent than us that we cannot fully comprehend what they’re doing. It is also possible that because they ARE smarter that they don’t bother communicating for trivial reasons (anything other than survival and reproduction).

I’m just stating the possibilities, I don’t necessarily believe them myself.

Simply speaking, the bigger an animal is, the bigger you’d expect its brain to be (it’d be pretty surprising if an elephant and a mouse both had brains the same size). Where an animal has a bigger brain than would be expected simply from looking at its body-size, it’s a fair assumption that the animal is more intelligent than the average animal. Google EQ (Encephalisation Quotient). And, as an aside, whales sure are tasty =) (Also, the Norwegian Minke whale harvest is, as it stands, a sustainable fishery. Something most other fisheries aren’t. I have far more guilt eating cod than i do munching whaleflesh).

Marconi is a REALLY weird spelling of Nikola Tesla… the inventor of the Radio

Technology might come to the rescue. If an RFID tag could be monitored ocean-wide, you could see if the whale is being harvested illicitly. You could inforce ownership rights between whalers. Once the whalers could see that the system worked, they’d become active conservationists.”[/quote]

I agree that the economic concept here is sound, but I don’t believe it would work with these animals. Their breeding cycle is too long to raise them under any cost effective method. And just a quick side note, when considering intelligence one of the most important aspect is actually the number of creases and folds in the brain, not just brain size. I am not sure why this is true but it could be this just creates more surface area, as some one mentioned in an earlier comment.