Why WHALES ARE PEOPLE, TOO (5 pages)
readersdigest.ca
Excerpt.
"...the history of the whale brain has been very different from those of primates and other mammals. Thirty-five million years ago it began arranging its parts into an utterly unique functional layout and structure. This achievement, says Marino, represents “an alternative evolutionary route to complex intelligence.”
The most intriguing part of the whale brain for Marino is the limbic system, which, in mammals, handles the processing of emotions. In some respects, she found this part of the whale brain is actually more convoluted than our own. In fact it’s so large it erupts into the cortex in the form of an extra paralimbic lobe. The location of the lobe suggests it is involved in a unique mash-up between emotional and cognitive thinking, perhaps some mix of social communication and self-awareness that we do not currently understand.
“Whales are arguably the most socially connected, communicative and coordinated mammals on the planet, including humans,” says Marino. “Killer whales, for instance, do not kill or even seriously harm one another in the wild, despite the fact that there is competition for prey and mates and there are disagreements. Their social rules prohibit real violence, and they seem to have worked out a way to peacefully manage the partitioning of resources among different groups. That is something we humans haven’t done yet...”
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