From: roberts@CMR.NCSL.NIST.GOV (John Roberts)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: Whales and Dolphins
Date: 2 Sep 92 01:53:10 GMT
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology
	formerly National Bureau of Standards


-From: ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright)
-Subject: Re: Whales and Dolphins
-Date: 17 Aug 92 20:58:11 GMT
-Organization: Engineering, CONVEX Computer Corp., Richardson, Tx., USA

-In <9208081935.AA29109@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov> roberts@CMR.NCSL.NIST.GOV (John Roberts) writes:

->Reread what I posted. Humans take calculated risks, and sometimes there
->are mistakes in the calculations. 

-Reread what I posted.  There are many people whose job is to save other
-people's lives *regardless* of the risk to their own.

-Suppose, for example, the President of United States, or one of his
-family, was kidnapped by a foreign power.  Do you believe that the
-United States government would not try to rescue him if it believed
-more than one soldier would die in the attempt?

Wow, you must really love this "discussion", since when the arguments start
to get scarce you chop up my own arguments and send them back to me! :-)

Seriously, if you wish to continue a debate over a long period of time,
you should keep records of what's been said, and refer to them occasionally.
I covered this *exact* point in a previous post:

.....................
|From: roberts@CMR.NCSL.NIST.GOV (John Roberts)
|Newsgroups: sci.space
|Subject: Re: Whales and Dolphins
|Message-ID: <9208040138.AA10420@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov>
|Date: 4 Aug 92 01:38:32 GMT

|-From: ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright)
|-Subject: Re: Whales and Dolphins
|-Date: 31 Jul 92 16:01:27 GMT

|-Oh?  So you've never heard of search parties going out looking
|-for a lost person, in bad weather, although several people may
|-die in the attempt?  Especially if the lost person is a child?
|-Sounds very human to me.

|Human search parties won't go out to rescue one person if the expected
|outcome is that several people *will* die in the attempt. (Unless it's
|the President or something.) There are many occasions when a search is
|called off because conditions are "too dangerous". A greater level of
|risk might be accepted if there are more people to be rescued, and less
|risk might be taken if rescue is considered unlikely. For an organized
|search, there has to be a calculation of the tradeoffs involved. (Note
|that this discussion is of cases where the threat is nonhuman in nature.)
[End of quoted text.]
.....................

Note that I already *said* the President would be an exception. In another
post I commented that one might consider highly trained or otherwise unique
and valuable individuals, or individuals in "unique" and valuable positions
to merit greater effort/risk to insure their well-being than a random member
of the general population. That's a rational choice, based on a desire to
protect the overall interests of the organization. That would hardly be
the case for the beginning of the envisioned "typical" mass beaching scenario.

You also missed a very important point from the end of the quoted portion
of my previous post. In your kidnapping example, there's an intelligent
adversary involved. While the country might not be too upset if some
particular president were hauled away by a foreign power and kept in a
small cage for several years (after all, there's a Vice President waiting
to take over), they still have to consider the possible effect of the
precedent on future actions. It would be difficult for a country the size
and complexity of the US to function well if its presidents were lugged
off on a regular basis. So it becomes very much worthwhile for the country
to "teach them a lesson" by vigorous retaliation. In this case the relative
tradeoff of lives (even lives of hostages of no particular merit) becomes
less important than demonstrating to the foreign power that kidnapping
is not a profitable technique to use in the future. Unless you wish to 
claim that the whales are somehow "teaching the beach a lesson" by throwing
themselves on it, you should avoid examples that include an intelligent
adversary. 

->Whales that beach themselves entirely seldom if ever survive (though on 
->the "R-rated Gory Animal Videos" series commercials on television, they 
->show a killer whale getting its head out on the beach to chomp a sea lion). 

-Nope.  Not true.  Not even close.  Killer whales have been known to
-deliberately wash schools of fish up onto the beach, then beach themselves
-to snatch up the helpless, flopping fish, and roll back into the water.
-They have been observed and photographed doing this.  You aren't proving
-that whales aren't intelligent.  You're simply showing how little you
-know about whales.

You agree with me that killer whales have been seen to put themselves on the
beach to catch prey then return themselves to the water, and then claim that
this point of agreement shows that I don't know much about whales? I don't
quite understand your point. (Dolphins can also be trained to throw themselves
completely out of the water onto dry land - I've seen it done. I guess the
fact that I know this shows that I'm even less knowledgable about whales. :-)

I had only heard of the term "beaching" to refer to whales grimly or 
frantically casting themselves on the beach to die. You seem to use the same
term for whales having a jolly romp on the beach, gulping down fish and
sea lions. Since by implication you must be more knowledgable about whales,
could you please explain the similarities or differences between these two
activities, and what the motivations for lethal beaching are?

->If whales have anything akin to human intelligence, and if they have a 
->community that communicates and passes down lore, then they must realize 
->that if they beach themselves, they're going to die, 

-If humans have anything akin to intelligence, and if they have a 
-community that communicates and passes down lore, then they must 
-realize that if they beach themselves, they're going to be exposed
-to dangerous levels of UV radiation, contract skin cancer and die.
-Ergo, humans cannot be intelligent.
 
Lying on the beach for a few hours isn't nearly as dangerous for a human as
it is for a whale, and if there are harmful effects, they may not show up for
decades, as opposed to killing them the same day. If whales have no more 
awareness of dangers that can kill them in a day than humans have of dangers
that can affect them over the course of 30-50 years, then that doesn't strike
me as a strong indicator of human-type intelligence in whales.

Note that I'm not saying that I don't consider whales to be intelligent.
As I stated earlier, I consider some species to be pretty stupid, while others
are much brighter. The most intelligent whales *may* have intelligence not
too different from that of humans, though I don't consider that to be proven.
There have been some encouraging signs, but I don't consider mass beaching
to be one of those signs - and I *think* there have been mass beachings of
killer whales.

->If what the whales do is deliberate suicide, it's even less akin to normal
->human behavior. 

-Of course. One human being may voluntarily expose himself to
-dangerous levels of UV radiation at the beach, but certainly
-his entire family wouldn't follow, would they?  

You could have argued your point a lot better by mentioning a group of
teenagers deciding to start smoking or taking drugs.

-If one human 
-is out drinking with his buddies, gets drunk and jumps into 
-his car, his friends aren't going to pile in with him, are they?
-Nah, that could never happen, could it?

Let me introduce an analogy: one of the classic challenges of plane geometry
is to trisect an arbitrary angle using the ancient Greek methods of 
straightedge and compass. This was proved to be mathematically impossible
a century or more ago, but that hasn't stopped some people from trying.
One particularly ingenious attempt I saw in a math book showed an angle that
was indeed trisected. It looked very convincing, until the author pointed
out that given the construction technique, the inventor had in fact taken
an arbitrary angle and *tripled* (not trisected) it. Since the generated
angle was made three times the original angle, *of course* the original angle
was one third of the generated angle - but it wasn't a valid arbitrary
trisection.

This is close to what you've been doing with most of your arguments. You
attempt to show that many humans exhibit behavior that's as stupid or
irrational as some of the things whales have been seen to do. From this it
supposedly follows that humans and whales have comparable intelligence or
intelligence/emotion ratio, and since "by definition" humans are intelligent,
that implies that whales are intelligent too.

I don't see what ultimate usefulness this line of reasoning is supposed to
have. I'm not interested in proving that humans can be as stupid as whales
or whatever space alien life forms we might encounter. It's much more
interesting to try to determine whether whales or other life forms can
exhibit any of the positive aspects of what we call human intelligence.

John Roberts              | "APE HAS KILLED APE."
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov | "APE HAS KILLED APE." - from "Battle for the Planet
                          | "APE HAS KILLED APE."   of the Apes"
                          | "I guess they just joined the human race."

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