Ecology

Dolphins are cute and friendly sea creatures that are often confused with fish. However, dolphins are intelligent and inquisitive mammals whose mental abilities many surprise scientists.

Dolphins have evolved complex abilities living in the harsh conditions of the oceans and seas. For example, did you know that dolphins can stay awake for long periods of time, have unique spatial orientation abilities, have a magnetic sense, and can even control blood flow in their bodies?

Dolphin brain

Dolphins can't sleep

All animals on the planet need sleep, including humans. The world record for sleep deprivation belongs to Randy Gardner who hasn't slept in 11 days. However, already on the 4th day he began to hallucinate.

If a person does not sleep, he will eventually die. The same thing will happen to any creature with developed brain functions, except for the dolphins, who, as it turned out, learned to deprive themselves of sleep and feel great at the same time. For example, baby dolphins do not sleep in the first month of their lives in the same way as their parents.


The thing is that these amazing creatures can turn off half of your brain for some time. Scientists continuously tested the reactions of dolphins for 5 days, and as it turned out, their reactions did not slow down. Blood tests for signs of stress or insomnia were negative. Dolphins can use this ability indefinitely.

Another study showed that dolphins can use echolocation for 15 consecutive days with almost perfect precision. This makes sense, as it allows the animals to always be on the alert and notice the approach of predators.


However, the most surprising thing is that part of the dolphin's brain is still asleep. At the same time, visual information begins to be processed by another, active part of the brain. In other words, if a dolphin "turns off" part of its brain, the second part of it can take on all the functions of the first. It's like having two brains instead of one.

Dolphin vision

Amazing vision of dolphins

It is known that dolphins use echolocation in order to navigate the world in which they live. Since in sea ​​depths visibility leaves much to be desired, it is easier for animals to use sounds to "see" objects. You might think that they do not need vision at all, but this is not so.


Dolphin vision much better than it might seem. Firstly, their eyes are located on both sides of their heads, which allows them to cover a huge area. at 300 degrees. They can see what is behind. Second, each eye moves independently of the other, allowing the animals to look in different directions at the same time.

Dolphins also have reflective cell layer, which is located behind the retina and is called tapetem lucidem. This allows them to see perfectly in low light. Moreover, dolphins see just as well above the surface of the water as they can see underwater.

Dolphin skin

You may be wondering why dolphins are not latched onto by other marine life, such as barnacles. Whales are often hung with these creatures, but dolphins seem to have immunity. Dolphin skin always looks smooth, clean and shiny. What is her secret?


Unique dolphin skin has a lot of advantages. Firstly, the top layer of the skin - the epidermis - in dolphins is not rougher than in humans, it is in 10-20 times thinner than the epidermis of any land animal. However, it is growing 9 times faster than ours.


The unique lungs of dolphins

Dolphins are known to be excellent swimmers. For example, a bottlenose dolphin can hold its breath while underwater, up to 12 minutes while diving deep up to 550 meters! They are capable of this thanks to their unique lungs.

Although the lungs of these animals are no larger than ours, they work much more efficiently. With every breath the dolphin changes about 80 percent or more air in the lungs. We can only change 17 percent.


The blood and muscles of dolphins can accumulate and transport a huge amount of oxygen due to the fact that in the body of animals more red blood cells. This means a higher concentration of hemoglobin than in humans.

However, all this cannot fully explain how dolphins manage to hold their breath for so long and dive to such depths. Turns out the dolphins able to direct blood flow in the right direction. For example, during deep-sea diving, blood moves from the limbs to the heart and brain, improving their performance in extreme conditions.

Wound healing in dolphins

When injured, dolphins are able to miraculously restore health. From the point of view of science, their ability to recover is comparable with something fantastic.

For example, dolphins can survive severe injuries and can regenerate large amounts of damaged flesh in just a couple of weeks. Moreover, their appearance is able to return to its original form. without any scars or deformities.


By the way, dolphins also there is no bleeding. For example, a person with a serious open injury may die only due to blood loss. When injured, the dolphin directs the blood flow in the right direction in the same way as it does when diving, which does not allow it to bleed out.

Dolphin natural painkillers

Dolphins don't seem to care about inconveniences like physical pain. After they sustain serious injuries that would immobilize anyone Living being on the planet, they can safely continue to play, swim and even eat normally.

With open wounds in dolphins, nerve endings are not exposed, which causes severe pain. This does not mean that they do not experience pain at all, they are also very sensitive, like us.

However, when seriously injured, dolphins just know how to.. ignore her. It is believed that their body is able to produce special painkillers, such as morphine, which, however, do not cause any addiction.


Dolphins developed such abilities during evolution, which allowed them to survive in dangerous conditions. For example, if a predator is chasing you, it is better not to show him that you are injured and that you are in pain. Then you have more likely to survive and not draw attention to yourself as weak and helpless.

Dolphins and infections

With open wounds on their bodies, dolphins are able to swim in water teeming with bacteria, and at the same time not pick up any infections. They don't even seem to be afraid of wounds from dirty shark teeth. A person in this situation would immediately die from blood poisoning within a few days. However, dolphins at least that!

It turns out that no infections cling to dolphins. It is known that the immune system of these animals is similar to ours, but how then do they manage to ward off all infection?

In fact, no one can say for sure where dolphins have such miraculous abilities. There is speculation that dolphins get some sort of antibiotics from plankton and algae.


The chemicals that these microscopic creatures produce have been found in dolphin subcutaneous fat. If the fat layer is damaged by injury, antibacterial substances are released.

How do dolphins manages to accumulate these life-saving substances under the skin, and not to process them during metabolism, remains a mystery to scientists.

Dolphins are the best swimmers

In 1936 the British zoologist Sir James Gray I was amazed at how fast dolphins can swim. He began to study their anatomy in great detail and found out that the skin of dolphins should have magical properties , which would prevent friction, only then would they be able to develop such a speed. This idea has been called "Grey's Paradox" and until 2008, scientists could not solve it.


Gray was partially right: dolphins do have anti-friction features. However, Gray underestimated the muscle strength of dolphins, which is 5 times greater than the muscle strength of the strongest person on the planet. Moreover, dolphins also know how to use their energy very efficiently.


A person can use only 4 percent of their energy to move through the water. Dolphins, in turn, transform 80 percent energy into thrust, making them the most efficient swimmers.

Dolphins magnetic sense

Why do dolphins and whales sometimes thrown ashore? This riddle excited the minds of scientists long years. Various theories have been proposed: strange diseases, environmental pollution, or testing military equipment. However, research has not supported either of these theories.

Cases when animals washed ashore were recorded for many hundreds of years, but only recently scientists began to guess what main reason : It turns out that it's all about the Sun and the magnetic field of our planet.


The brains of dolphins and whales have special magnetic crystals, which allow them to sense the Earth's magnetic field. With the help of this built-in GPS system, they can move around the vast expanses of the ocean, orienting themselves in space without much difficulty.

One group of researchers mapped east coast United States where observed mass cases death of dolphins. As it turned out, these areas coincided with places where magnetic rocks lowered the levels of the planet's magnetic field.


Thus, a dolphin or whale that navigates by a magnetic field could simply "not notice" shore and landed on dry land.

Scientists also found that when the sun emits too much radiation, it affects magnetic feelings marine mammals and also confuses them. Most animals wash ashore when the activity of the Sun is at its strongest. This may also explain why rescued animals return to shore again.

Dolphin electroreception

The echo sounders in the body of dolphins are truly incredible. Amazes their ability feel objects in the distance. Animals are able to send sound signals and listen to echoes reflected from objects.

If we add to this rare feeling the rest of the abilities of dolphins, which were mentioned above, we can conclude that dolphins really have fantastic feelings and abilities that distinguishes them from other living beings.


However, mother nature endowed them with something else: electroreception - the ability to feel electrical impulses sent by other living beings.

Guyanese dolphins live off the coast of South America and look similar to bottlenose dolphins. Researchers have found special indentations in their beaks, which are able to recognize electrical impulses sent by the muscles of fish.


A similar feature is found in animals such as platypuses. They use it to find fish hiding in the mud. Echolocation allows dolphins to determine the position of objects in space, but it not particularly effective at close range, so electroreception comes into play.

In difficult periods of history, only aquatic organisms can survive on Earth?

Behind how del fina m one hundred le kr upny i and sl fire th mo zg?

When the German physiologist M. Tiedemann saw the brain of a dolphin for the first time back in 1827, he was amazed. The brain of a dolphin turned out to be larger than that of a monkey and almost the same as that of a human.

Professor A. Portman from Switzerland conducted research on the mental abilities of animals and found out that according to the results of the test, a person came out on top - 215 points, a dolphin was on the second - 190 points, and an elephant was the third winner. The monkey took only fourth place.

When scientists compared the human and dolphin brains, it turned out that the average human brain weighs about 1.4 kg (Turgenev's largest is 2.12 kg). The brain of a dolphin pulls 1.7 kg. Moreover, the cortex has twice as many convolutions. Isn't this what explains the amazing quick wits and incredible quickness of thinking of the dolphin? He is able to assimilate the amount of knowledge 1.5 times more than you and I. In addition, dolphins have their own colloquial speech with which they can communicate with each other and transmit the necessary information.

Why does a dolphin have such a large and complex brain? Of course, not just to eat, swim smartly, produce offspring.

This question interested scientists and they tried to establish who was the ancestor of the dolphin. Remaining elements in the skeleton of animals confirm that they originated from some kind of terrestrial quadrupedal mammals. Blood tests suggested that cetaceans, which include dolphins, and ungulates are relatives. But what made the dolphin ancestor change his terrestrial existence to a water one 65 million years ago, and who, in fact, was he?

It can be assumed that the whole thing is some kind of cosmic cataclysms that touched the Earth and forced animals to seek salvation in the water. After all, it was 65 million years ago that dinosaurs suddenly disappeared from the Earth. Finally, what was the land in those days: tiny islands in the vast expanse of the oceans. It could happen that someone did not have enough space on this small land.

Who knows, maybe the forerunner of man and dolphin was the same creature: having picked up a stick from the ground, it went through a grandiose path of earthly evolution and became a man, and, returning to the sea, it became a dolphin.

Like it or not, it is difficult to say with accuracy. However, one thing is absolutely clear: if man is the crown of creation on Earth, then the dolphin is the crown of creation in the ocean, "the king of the expanses of the sea."

Dolphins give birth to babies in the water. At the time of childbirth, the female raises her tail high above the water, the dolphin is born in the air and has time to breathe before it falls into the water. For the first hours, the baby dolphin swims like a float in an upright position, slightly moving its front flippers: it has accumulated a sufficient supply of fat in the womb, and its density less density water. There is always a mother and one or two more females nearby.

The dolphin feeds on mother's milk for the first time. When sucking, the baby’s lips are replaced by a tongue rolled into a tube: he covers the mother’s nipple with it, and she splashes milk into his mouth. All this happens underwater: the respiratory canal is separated from the esophagus, and the dolphin can swallow food underwater without fear of choking. After 3 years, he becomes an adult. Dolphins live up to 30 years. Cubs are born once every 2 years.

Dolphins move easily and quickly in the water. With a sudden jump, he throws the body out of the water in order to take a breath. Their shiny bodies amaze with a perfectly streamlined shape, reminiscent of a drop or a torpedo. The muzzle is extended into a narrow beak, the nostrils are merged into one "blowhole", from which the animal can release a fountain of spray 1-1.5 m high.

An adult dolphin is capable of reaching speeds of over 50 km/h. This speed is facilitated not only by the streamlined shape of the body, but also special properties skin. The outer layer - about 1.5 mm - is extremely elastic. The inner layer with a thickness of about 4 mm consists of a dense fabric. Interestingly, the inner part of the outer layer is permeated with many passages and tubes filled with a soft fatty substance. By the way, artificial skin for submarines is similar in quality to dolphin skin.

Dolphins have complex audio signaling. They are able to create and perceive ultrasounds. Precise sonar makes it possible for them to detect objects the size of an acorn in water at a distance of up to 15 m. Thanks to echolocation, dolphins find food and avoid collisions with obstacles even in completely muddy water.

Examples

Once a passenger ship was wrecked. Several people survived. None of them believed that they could survive. And when they saw a flock of sharks approaching them, they said goodbye to each other. But suddenly a miracle happened. From high seas a flock of dolphins rushed swiftly, fearlessly dispersing a flock of sharks. And she helped people stay afloat until help arrived.

An even more striking incident occurred with the fishermen in the same place in the Black Sea. A flock of dolphins surrounded the launch and swam nearby, making sounds and clearly trying to attract the attention of people. The dolphins circled around the ship until people realized that the animals were worried about something. Following them, they found a captured dolphin. Having fought off the flock, he got tangled in a fishing net. The cub was rescued and released.

The fate of the famous dolphin Tuffy, an honorary member of the American underwater expedition, is interesting. The dolphin worked as a postman and conductor, bringing appliances and tools. If one of the aquanauts swam too far into the sea and lost his bearings, Taffy always came to the rescue and led the lost one to the house on a nylon leash. After such a brilliant debut, Tuffy was accepted into service at one of the US missile ranges. He searched the sea for the electronic devices of spent rocket stages. All equipment was crammed with miniature ultrasonic transmitters. The dolphin was in a hurry to their "call signs".

The dolphin Polorus Jack, so nicknamed by English sailors, has been guiding ships through the dangerous strait in New Zealand for 25 years as a real pilot.

Not so long ago in marine aquarium Miami had an absolutely amazing case. Several dolphins caught in the ocean were brought here for training. Not far from the recruits were already trained dolphins. They did not see each other. And yet, a conversation immediately began between them. All night long strange sounds and noises were heard from the pool. The unthinkable happened in the morning. The new dolphins immediately began to perform all the tricks that people intended to teach them. It seems that their brothers, who have long lived in the pool, told them about this.

V. Avdeenko.

The distant ancestors of dolphins lived on land. Only about 70 million years ago they went to live in the ocean. Why? Because in difficult periods of history, only aquatic organisms can survive on Earth. How longer people I study dolphins, the less implausible seems the hypothesis that these mammals created their own civilization, indistinguishable in complexity from ours.

Level mental development dolphins is very high. To what extent, the person has not yet been able to establish. Perhaps this species is in no way inferior to Homo sapiens in terms of intelligence. The dolphin brain surpassed the human brain both in weight and in the number of convolutions and nerve cells in the bark.

Dolphins have their own communication system, which is in no way inferior to human language. The language of dolphins includes both gestures (turns of the head, tail, fins, various postures, jumps) and various sounds, which are sound and ultrasonic impulses.

Only whistles in the language of dolphins, the researchers counted 32 varieties. Each of them carries certain information - a greeting signal, the call of relatives, an expression of alarm, and so on. Interestingly, some native tribes of the Canary Islands and Mexico at a great distance also communicate with the help of a whistle.

By scanning the language of dolphins using the Zipf method, scientists have received indisputable evidence that it serves to transmit information, like human speech. The Zipf method allows you to determine whether sounds carry informational meaning. Its essence lies in determining the frequency of repetition of identical letters in speech. In the form of a mathematical graph, the speech of intelligent beings has the form of an inclined line, and random noises are located strictly horizontally. So, the speech of dolphins had the same slope coefficient on the graph as the language of people.

It was possible to isolate about 200 communication signs in the vocabulary of communication of these mammals. But their deciphering is slow and difficult. The sound communication of dolphins occurs in the range up to 300 kHz, while humans communicate with each other in the frequency band up to 20 kHz. Like humans, dolphins' speech has six levels of organization, from sound to context. But if people begin to understand each other only from the third level (word), then dolphins communicate even with the help of monosyllabic sounds.

There are many similarities between humans and dolphins. And this applies not only to the complexity of the organization of speech. Dolphins live as long as people, create families, love to communicate, grow up at the same age. Depending on the region of habitat, the language of dolphins differs slightly, which allows us to draw a parallel with the national languages ​​of people.

American scientists have found that each dolphin at birth receives a name from its relatives (a certain form of whistle lasting 0.9 seconds), which it responds to throughout its life. Dolphins refer to each other by name when communicating.

If the dolphin is alone in the pool, then it is silent. But as soon as another individual appears nearby, they begin to reproduce the richest set of sounds.

The study shows that approximately eight of the 67 species of Odontoceti (including dolphins) went through an EQ increase approximately 15 million years ago, reaching factors of 4 and 5, although the reasons for this second evolutionary leap remain completely unclear (there is only one such case of "explosive" development "intelligence" among large animals, known to scientists today: over five million years of human history, EQ has increased from about 2.5 to 7). At the same time, the "mental abilities" of the rest of the "dolphin tribe" for some reason, on the contrary, decreased.

John Lilly had time to read and approve my article just before he died. Thank God I managed to tell him that he was right!

(Pub. In Proceedings, THE 5TH WORLD MULTICONFERENCE ON SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS SCI "2001,)
PROSPECTS OF INFORMATION
INTEGRATION OF HUMAN AND DOLPHIN INTELLIGENCES

A. G. Yushchenko

Email: [email protected]

Dolphin brain (Fig. L. Kruger and A. Bretnach) Human brain (Fig. R. Kopp)
/A.G. Tomilin, "Dolphins serve man", M.: Nauka, 1969, 248s./

Introduction. Current state The global "human anthill" could be visually characterized by a picture depicting a builder who erects a grandiose structure, removing blocks from its foundation for this. Here we will not analyze the causes of the "dinosaur syndrome" in our anthropo-chauvinistic species, since this has been done by many researchers (our contribution to this movement is the work "The Ethics of Living Matter as the Basis of Human Ethics"), but we will proceed from the fact that the thinking majority imbued with the spirit of the Vancouver Declaration, which proclaimed in 1989 on behalf of the 24 leading experts of the world that "the preservation of life on Earth is one of the main tasks facing mankind" . In this study, we will try to determine, from a pantheistic position, the logic of space-time megasynthesis not only at the level of human individuals, but also at the level of the most cephalic life forms, to which some species of dolphins must be attributed. The need for such interspecies cooperation is understood as a natural step in the integration of the superconsciousness of the noosphere.

1. Information and intelligence in the modern world

Our modern world, unlike previous historical eras, has time to change significantly during a single human life. Key role in the transformation of the world belongs to the so-called "information technology". Building a developed information society, in which a web of computer networks will entangle almost all spheres of human life, is a priority task for the EU. In the general case, information is a kind of microstructure associated according to a certain law with the corresponding macro event. Information relieves us of the need for personal presence and observation of all events; having information, we have the opportunity to see them as many times as we like and at a convenient time in our imagination or on a computer screen. The phenomenon of the Internet is easiest for us to explain from evolutionary and biological positions. Modern views on information allow us to conclude that it is the basis of all known to us evolutionary processes at various levels of structural organization: biological, mental, virtual. For the subject of our study, it will be important to consider the role of information exchange in social insects: ants, bees and termites, which established communication links long before the appearance of man. Comparing the role of the nervous system in multicellular organisms in terms of synchronization life cycles individual organs and the language of social insects, we can conclude that they perform identical functions, and therefore consider the latter as some kind of exotic form of a single organism, consisting of relatively separate moving parts. Clearly, language and communication in other species, including humans, serve the same purpose at various levels of their association. Thus, the development of the Internet is the formation of a "nervous system" in the global human anthill. Intellectual and cultural integration, due to the democratic nature of computer technology, is becoming available to an increasing number of people; individual consciousnesses of the latter, together with increasingly complex systems artificial intelligence tend to form a single biotechnological superconsciousness of the planet. Having understood the logic of the modern phase of megasynthesis, we must ask ourselves the question of the possibility of such integration among other biological species. The tool for such consideration should be the results of the analysis of the evolutionary causes of the emergence and development of human intelligence.
It is important to note that the condition for the spiritual and moral integration of a person with other higher forms of life is the adoption by him of a modern bioethical concept, set forth, for example, in the work .

2. Tursiops Truncatus and Homo sapiens

Over the past decades, no animal has attracted as much attention from scientists, and the public as well, as a dolphin. For a long time it was believed that Telemachus, the son of the legendary Odysseus, was the "first mortal" who made friends with his rescued dolphin. Relatively recently discovered in the caves of South Africa, stylized drawings depicting a man swimming next to a dolphin turned out to be much older. It is interesting to compare these findings with the original and well-argued hypothesis about the decisive significance of " aqueous phase"in the formation of Homo sapiens on islands near Africa. Then it is quite possible to assume that the friendship of our ancestors with dolphins could be calculated for thousands of years, and maybe millions of years ...
The family of dolphins has about 50 species, among them the bottlenose dolphin or bottlenose dolphin is most famous due to its quick wit, friendly meek disposition, and size that does not frighten a person, unlike, for example, a seven-meter killer whale. Humans and dolphins turned out to have a lot in common: a similar brain structure (see figure), an unexpected appearance in the fossil record, a love of games and imitative behavior, an altruistic love for offspring, etc. Ancient Greek and Roman scientists described cases known to them of cooperative fishing by people and dolphins, rescue by the latter of drowning people (the famous singer Arion was among them), protection from sharks; recent history has fully confirmed the accuracy of such information.
The last decades have brought another surprise - the miraculous ability of dolphins to have a beneficial effect on the nervous system of people during sessions of joint swimming was discovered. The nature of the unique healing effect has not yet been revealed, despite the many models put forward from biofield to biosonar (dolphin sonar frequency range from a few Hertz to two hundred MHz at a power of up to 8 watts / cm), which does not interfere with its long-term use in various countries world: the USA, Denmark, Cuba, Japan, etc. Ukraine is also one of the pioneers in this field thanks to the work carried out at the Research Center "State Oceanarium" of the Ministry of Defense and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Sevastopol, established in 1966 at the direction of Commander-in-Chief of the Navy of the USSR Admiral Gorshkov). For several decades, dolphins have been trained by US Navy instructors to search for sunken military installations, naval base protection, and so on. Such work has been carried out in former USSR. In general, it seems that the achievements in this interspecies cooperation are impressive, but what are their prospects in the light of the ideas that excited the world community in their time? Let us briefly dwell on the brightest of these ideas, which were expressed by the head of the Department of General Research of the Cerebral Cortex, National Institute of mental health(USA) by John Lilly and Igor Charkovsky. In the book "Man and Dolphin" (1962), based on his own research and assessment of the level structural development brains of higher mammals, Dr. Lilly predicted that "in the next 10 to 20 years, humanity will establish communication with representatives of other biological species." He considered Bottlenose Dolphin to be the most suitable partner for a number of reasons. The idea of ​​Igor Charkovsky is purely bio-evolutionary: a technocratic civilization will inevitably lead to an ecological catastrophe on land, and people will be forced to flee in the ocean. Together with the dolphins they will create a new civilization, final product which will be a more perfect creature "homo-dolphinus". It is claimed that Charkovsky's followers are able to sleep on the water and find food in the sea; that they have established special, apparently telepathic contacts with the dolphins. At least in Charkovsky's group there are children safely born in the water under the supervision of dolphins. Well, such a development of events, with the uncontrolled overpopulation of our planet and ignoring environmental problems, is quite possible. However, would the ocean then still be suitable for the survival of higher mammals? However, so far no one has been able to establish verbal contact with the dolphin, which greatly increases the already huge number of skeptics of this exciting prospect. And yet there is reason to believe that Lilly's bold predictions partly came true after five years! This was demonstrated by the famous chimpanzee Washoe when, in 1967, she first asked for a "tasty" in the language of the deaf and dumb. North America- "Amslene", i.e. in human language. Note that subsequently a whole colony of chimpanzees was organized, using this language (up to a hundred words) both for intraspecific communication and for communication with humans. The chimpanzee brain is about three times smaller than the human brain and less structurally developed; the bottlenose dolphin's brain is larger in weight than a human's and even structurally superior in some parameters. So why are elementary intelligent contacts established with a chimpanzee, and not with a dolphin? Next, we will try to answer this question.
Homo sapiens and the higher species of dolphins, including Tursiops truncatus (bottle dolphin) are the most cephalized life forms in terrestrial and aquatic environments, respectively, which determines the fundamental feature of their interspecies position. There is still no strictly scientific explanation of the reasons for the evolutionary necessity of such a complex and large brain in higher dolphins, just as there is no clear evidence that they have highly developed speech and higher forms of rational activity. However, the common belief that this remarkable development of the dolphin's brain is mainly due to its orientation-location abilities is refuted by the fact that in bat"an extremely weakly cephalic brain, and in terms of temporal lobes differentiation it ranks among the last among mammals" despite its known echolocation abilities. It seems to us that the emergence of such a perfect brain in dolphins could be due in their evolution to the information function aimed at socialization. The presence of information exchange between dolphins is confirmed by the consistency of their actions, both during group hunting and in extreme situations, as well as by experiments on the exchange of information (via an acoustic channel) between dolphins in isolated pools, conducted by scientists from the American and Soviet naval departments. However, an unambiguous correlation between FM signals and dolphin behavior has not yet been established. Scientists from the National Research Center “State Oceanarium” recently discovered a fine harmonic composition of communication signals and substantiated the position on the informational significance of multiple higher harmonics, which have not been previously studied. The results of their work allow us to conclude that for communication in the near-surface non-stationary marine environment dolphins use test information signals. In this case, using the test signal, it becomes possible to determine the law of distortion of multiple harmonics in each specific traffic and, by applying the inverse transformation to the distorted information signal (which requires a highly developed brain), restore it quite completely. It should be noted that the SRC "GO" also developed the design of a modernized transposing device that converts the harmonic spectrum of dolphin signals into the frequency range perceived by humans. In general, it seems that modern telecommunication technologies make it possible to overcome technical problem a significant difference between the natural communication systems of humans and dolphins. However, the problem is not only this. It is very important to understand that the formation of the intellect of an individual human individual in a particular historical phase is organically linked with the corresponding level of culture, determined by the state of scientific and technological progress of the entire human community. For the formation of the intellect of the individual in human society, the institution of the family serves and a multi-stage education system has been created, which actually plays the role of a replicator of the cultural mime pool. Special attention should be paid to the fact that the ability to form a person's intellect is fundamentally dependent on his age. Numerous cases known to us of long-term upbringing of children outside of human society, for example, in a family of wolves, show that they, returning back to people, are practically not amenable to learning. Apparently, their brain neurons lose the ability to make additional connections. Fundamental experiments by Mark Rosenzweig showed that "in rats reared in "enriched" laboratory conditions (i.e. in spacious cages where they were kept together with other rats and had a lot of different items to play with), the cerebral cortex was developed better than rats reared in empty and cramped cages. Expanding social and physical experience leads to more development of the nervous system, and thanks to this, rats solve various tasks faster and better, for example, tasks with a maze. " In other words, the intelligence of highly organized animals depends to a large extent on upbringing and learning, i.e. from their information environment. Obviously, the higher the biological organization of the brain, the greater the importance of the environment in its active formation. This means that a person's intelligence is replicated by a kind of "social operator" due to the age-related plasticity of his brain, since " nervous system of man must develop in the conditions of human life in order to give rise to human consciousness. The age-related plasticity of the mammalian brain is a fundamental fact, the significance of which, it seems, is not yet fully understood. To give an example: in a person who has "severe damage to the left side of the brain ... the brain is plastic enough to transfer control of speech to the intact left hemisphere. In an adult, this plasticity is not retained." (highlighted by us). In essence, our goal is to come to an understanding that, with respect to the most cephalic dolphin species, it is correct to set the task not of assessing the level of their intelligence, as has been done so far, but of finding methods for its active age-related formation, in a certain sense, modeling replication functions. social institutions human community!
The main expected results in case successful implementation such a research project could be:
(1) confirmation of the fundamental possibility of the intellectual development of the higher species of dolphins, corresponding to the “outstanding neocortex size” of their highly differentiated brain to the informational perception of the achievements of human culture and, based on it -
(2) new form interspecies cooperation in the practical and spiritual spheres, corresponding to the evolutionary trend of the formation of the planetary superconsciousness.
Naturally, only further research can determine the true physiological capabilities of the dolphin brain and their readiness to perceive the achievements of human intelligence. Of course, a priori, we cannot say anything about the mechanism of thinking of a dolphin, even in humans it is predominantly left-hemispheric (verbal) or right-hemispheric (figurative). In this regard, it would be appropriate to recall Norbert Wiener, who "noted that he happens to think both with words and without words" and Albert Einstein, who noted the following in this regard: "Words, written or spoken, apparently do not play the slightest role in mechanism of my thinking. The mental elements of thinking are certain, more or less clear, signs or images that can be reproduced and combined "at will" .

CONCLUSION

The moral basis of the study proposed here of the possibilities of assimilation by the intellect of the most cephalized species of dolphins of the historical achievements of human culture is a person’s awareness of himself as a creation created by an evolutionary thought process and, therefore, the need for ethical compliance of his activity with the logic of general planetary development, from which it follows that scientific and technical , as well as the spiritual achievements of mankind belong to the general phenomenon of life on Earth. Let us note that the concept, substantiated by us, of the homology of the psychology of the creativity of consciousness and nature allows us to interpret evolution as a reflective thought process. The scientific substantiation of the possibility of such a form of intellectual cooperation is the fundamental property of the "plasticity" of the nervous tissue of mammals, which is the anatomical basis historical development human civilization as well as the highly developed brains of the most cephalic dolphin species. Technical support designing a communication channel for the practical implementation of the noted interspecies cooperation are the outstanding achievements of modern telecommunication technologies in coding, transmission and processing of information signals, as well as in the recognition of complex images.
Unfortunately, the plasticity of the nervous tissue of humans and dolphins can be used for inhumane purposes to ensure the selfish corporate interests of influential structures of the human community. Therefore, I would like to draw the attention of the democratic public to this problem, and in particular, altruistic organizations in terms of monitoring compliance with both ethical standards in the field of education and mass communication, and bioethical - in the field of scientific research.
The obvious fact that human practical activity and the still remaining probability of a nuclear catastrophe have created a real threat to the existence of life in its modern highly developed forms, deprives a person of the right to consider himself superior to other harmless living organisms. Most likely, the main reason for the genetically determined aggressiveness of man is that the main driving force in his creation was the Malthusian natural selection "due to overpopulation": many of man's closest relatives were killed, and in many cases even eaten. At the same time, whales and dolphins are the highest achievement of selection due to "increasing adaptation" to the environment. Anyone who has an elementary aesthetic sense of beauty cannot but admire their perfection in relation to their habitat; this latter makes up 2/3 of the surface of our planet, which therefore should be called the Ocean, where life originated. Indeed, the exceptional morphological feature of cetaceans is the "general reduction of limbic structures", which "perhaps determines the pronounced "meek" character of dolphins" .
Whether an aggressive and self-righteous person is not a mistake in the evolutionary thought process, our coming generations will already know. In general, it seems that the ethical rule of survival modern man is sensual integration with all forms of life through the adoption of the ethics of living matter and, probably, intellectual integration logically complementing it with the rest of the most cephalized creations of the earthly mind.

LITERATURE

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In Douglas Adams' brilliant classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there were several animals smarter than humans. One - not without irony - was an ordinary laboratory mouse. Another creature was aware of the intergalactic bulldozers that eventually vaporized the planet and tried to warn us of the coming fate. Last message the dolphins was misinterpreted as a remarkably sophisticated attempt at a double somersault through a hoop while whistling a merry ditty, but in reality the message was: "Good luck and thanks for the fish!"

Dolphins are said to have an unusual level of intelligence that sets them apart and elevates them above the rest of the animal kingdom. It is widely believed that dolphins are very intelligent (perhaps smarter than humans), have complex behavior and have proto-language abilities. However, recently, against the background of studies of these animals, a somewhat different, sometimes opposite, opinion has developed.

The exalted status of dolphins among animals came about with John Lilly, a 1960s dolphin researcher and hobbyist. psychotropic drugs. He first popularized the idea that dolphins are smart, and later even suggested that they are smarter than humans.

Ultimately, after the 1970s, Lilly was largely discredited and did not contribute much to the science of dolphin cognition. But despite the efforts of mainstream scientists to distance themselves from his bizarre ideas (that dolphins were spiritually enlightened) and even the craziest ones (that dolphins communicate with holographic images), his name is inevitably associated with dolphin research.

"He is, and I think most dolphin scientists would agree with me, the father of the study of dolphin intelligence," writes Justin Gregg in Are Dolphins Really Smart?.

Since Lilly's research, dolphins have shown that they can understand signals transmitted from a television screen, distinguish parts of their bodies, recognize their own image in a mirror, and have a complex repertoire of whistles and even names.

In any case, all these ideas have recently been questioned. Gregg's book is the latest tug-of-war between neuroanatomy, behavior and communication - between the ideas that dolphins are special and that they are on par with many other creatures.

Why big brains

So far, the debunking of dolphin abilities has dealt with two main topics: anatomy and behavior.

Munger, researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand South Africa, previously argued that the dolphin's large brain most likely evolved to help the animal keep warm rather than to perform cognitive functions. This article from 2006 was widely criticized by the dolphin research community.

In his new work (also written by Munger), he takes a critical approach to the study of brain anatomy, archaeological records, and much-cited behavioral research, concluding that cetaceans are no smarter than other invertebrates and that their large brains appeared for a different purpose. This time he cites many behavioral observations as an example, such as image recognition in a mirror, which was conducted in September 2011 and appeared as a result in Discover. Munger found them incomplete, incorrect, or outdated.

Lori Marino, a pro-brain intelligence neuroanatomist at Emory University, is working on a rebuttal.

Smarter!

Another argument - that the behavior of dolphins is not as impressive as they say - leads Gregg. As a professional dolphin researcher, he notes that he respects the "achievements" of dolphins in the field of cognition, but feels that the public and other researchers have slightly overestimated their actual level of cognitive abilities. In addition, many other animals show similar impressive features.

In his book, Gregg cites experts who question the value of the self-perception mirror test, which is thought to indicate some degree of self-awareness. Gregg notes that octopuses and pigeons can act like dolphins if given a mirror.

In addition, Gregg argues that dolphin communications are overrated. While their whistles and clicks are certainly complex forms of audio signals, they nonetheless lack the features of human language (such as the conclusion of finite concepts and meanings or freedom from emotions).

In addition, he criticizes attempts to apply information theory - a branch of mathematics - to the information contained in dolphin whistles. Can information theory be applied to animal communication at all? Gregg has his doubts, and he's not alone.

Gregg points out that dolphins certainly have many impressive cognitive abilities, but so do many other animals. And not necessarily the smartest: Many chickens are just as smart at some tasks as dolphins, Gregg says. Spiders also demonstrate amazing abilities for cognition, and yet they do have eight eyes.

Craving for knowledge

It is important to note that researchers like Munger are in the minority among scientists who study dolphin cognition. Moreover, even Gregg tries to distance himself from the idea of ​​mediocrity of dolphins - he rather says that other animals are smarter than we thought.

Even Gordon Gallup, the behavioral neuroscientist who pioneered the use of mirrors to assess self-awareness in primates, expresses doubts that dolphins are capable of this.

“In my opinion, the videos taken during this experiment are not convincing,” he said in 2011. "They are suggestive, but not convincing."

The arguments against dolphin exclusivity boil down to three main ideas. First, according to Munger, dolphins are simply not smarter than other animals. Secondly, it is difficult to compare one species with another. Third, there is too little research on this topic to draw firm conclusions.

Despite their reputation for exceptional intelligence, dolphins may not be as smart as they thought they were.

Scott Norris, writing in Bioscience, points out that "the cunning Scott Lilly" did a great job of creating the image " smart dolphins' in the 1960s. He was fascinated by dolphins and spent years teaching them how to talk. Lilly were unethical, sometimes even immoral, but he was not the only one who tried to teach the language of animals, which were credited with the rudiments of intelligence. Complex communications are born out of social systems, and social interactions require other traits that are often associated with intelligence. Culture is needed to form and remember social bonds, learn new behaviors, and work together.

From this point of view, dolphins do display behaviors and practices associated with culture and intelligence. Norris notes that studies of wild dolphins and whales show that their vocalizations are varied and specific enough to be considered a language. Dolphins easily learn new behavior and are even capable of imitation. They track complex social hierarchies within and between groups. They are even known to invent new forms of behavior in response to new situations, which, according to Norris, some scientists consider "the most hallmark intellect." What's more, dolphins can even teach each other these new behaviors. Norris describes how some populations of dolphins used sponges to protect themselves from scratches and taught others the technique. This transmission of practices is seen by many as the birth of a culture.

Yes, dolphins appear to be smarter than many species, but their behavior is by no means unique to dolphins. Many animals, such as wild boars, dogs, primates, or sea ​​lions, have complex vocalizations, social relationships, the ability to learn, imitate and adapt to new situations that are just as complex. Many skills, in particular learning, are more developed in other species than in dolphins. Cultural exchange, which has yet to be proven in dolphins, is less common, but other animals are not yet well understood. Other examples can be identified.

The problem is not only and not so much whether dolphins are smart, because at some level they are really smart, but whether they are smarter than other animals, and this remains to be seen. Dolphins like to attribute human traits. In many dolphins you can see "faces" and "smiles", which cannot be said, for example, about a wild boar. Looking at this grinning face, we begin to see people in dolphins. Are dolphins smart? It all depends on how smart you want them to be.