Dolphin with wearable computer?

Finishing up our mirror animal consciousness theme, we promised one last very special animal (or group). This is it. Cetaceans, which includes dolphins, are the last of the currently known very small group of highly intelligent animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror. (All of the others are mammals, with the exception of magpies. We started off with extinct mammoths, who are closely related to elephants, then went through magpies and great apes, with a lot of mirror photos along the way.)

The actual animal that passed the mirror test is the bottlenose dolphin (shown here), but it is believed all cetaceans can pass the test. Cetaceans include dolphins, whales, and porpoises, known to be some of the most animals out there. This particular leaping bottlenose dolphin is named K-Dog, and has been trained by the in mine-clearing operations by the US Navy.

Many people (and some bloggers) erroneously believe chimps are the second smartest animal after humans. Chimps are our closest living relatives; we evolving from a very chimp-like common ancestor about 7 million years ago. We share 99% of our DNA with chimps, a fact we’ve previously humorously mentioned. Chimps are indeed very, very smart as animal go. But they are not the second-smartest animal. Dolphins are the second-smartest animal on the planet. (And other cetaceans may be close behind.) Chimps come in somewhere very close behind after the smartest cetaceans. At best chimps are only the fourth or fifth smartest animal on the planet. Our own genus evolved from chimp-like ancestors to leap-frog the cetaceans. That’s an important point we’ll make elsewhere, because it strongly makes the case for convergent evolution of intelligent systems. It’ll come up again when we talk about artificial intelligence concepts (and the singularity or so-called artificial superintelligence) as well as topics like the Fermi paradox.

He’s wearing what looks like a camera, but it is described as a locator beacon (and probably includes a camera and other aspects of a wearable computer.) We already discussed wearable computers for dolphins and others aquatic animals, with a somewhat dark humor, with our earlier Dr. Evil photo as part of the Interspecies Internet project. (We jokingly suggested wearables for sharks with laser beams, to put them on the Internet, but that’s not looking good if sharks aren’t self-aware enough to even recognize themselves in a reflection.)

Dolphins have an important connection to data science. Some years back information theory (an aspect of data science) was used to analyze their language. At the time even less was known about their language, but the analysis proved conclusively that dolphin noises were information-rich and certainly not random. (It has since been learned that every dolphin has a name it responds to. We could almost quote TS Eliot here, talking about dolphins instead of cats.) Dolphins and information theory are as good a place as any to start the story of data, the subject of our next photos.

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