this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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I do think sometimes about how sea life intelligence is going to look extremely different from land-dwelling mammal intelligence. Industry of any kind is going to be much harder in the ocean, since you can't even make a fire. So it's possible there's a lot of stuff down there that's mostly as intelligent as we are but just can't develop a civilization the way we did because of the conditions they live in.
Like imagine we encountered a group of proto-humans who for whatever reason never harnessed fire, complex tools, or agriculture. Would we recognize their intelligence, or would we just think of them like chimpanzees, bonobos, and other apes? I think the latter. They'd be in zoos.
Yeah capitalists separated orcas from their loved ones to imprison them in a fucking swimming pool, and then acted shocked when a couple seaworld trainers got mauled. Not a single non-captive orca has killed a human: divers actually regularly swim with them (and there's several cases of orcas charging at distant lone swimmers before turning away when they see it's a human)
There's videos of them uncannily mimicking human words to seemingly attempt communication, as well as offering us gifts of their captured prey, and even seaweed after we refused all the meat
They also seem to have a pretty good idea that humans have diverse morals and practices. They distinguish individual humans as well as larger groups, and the matriarchs seem to remember and pass a library of information across generations. Historically, they knew to recognize and flee from settler Japanese and the Europeans who hunted them, while maintaining proximity to indigenous Japanese Ainu and certain Native Americans, who revered orcas and developed a symbiotic hunting relationship (and believed to have a deep spiritual friendship with them)
At the peak of orca hunting, they adapted extremely quick by sharing knowledge across pods, such as the locations of boats containing hostile cultures of humans, as well as evasion strategies. We found out that they literally figured out sailboats moved in the direction of the wind, and that they just needed to feel the wind and migrate the opposite way of that.
The last human zoo exhibit was in 1994.
Humans have been using fire to cook food for over a million years. We diverged from chimpanzees six millionish years ago. Its almost guaranteed that cooking food is intimately tied up with the divergence of humans from other apes, as it gave us access to greater sources of nutrition, as well as the ability to spend less time eating by using heat to break down food instead of our teeth and guts
Not to mention it's hard to have anything other than oral tradition. No way to write anything down. I remember someone talking about how octopodes and parrots are both incredibly clever, but they don't have any real way of transferring knowledge between generations, so each one must relearn the same stuff. And squids only live like 8 years or so, which don't help either.
I think orcas transfer knowledge? This is not at all my area of expertise, but I know different pods will have different ways of hunting the same prey + fashion fads and other stuff. But they don't have any sort of permanent record, which must be sucky.
Oral tradition can be incredibly rich. Most civilizations in human history had no written language, until very recently. Only a few human cultures created written languages independently (Egyptians, Sudanese, Chinese, Iraqis, and a couple others). Mythology and epics from Ancient Greece, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, were complicated stories passed exclusively by word of mouth from traveling poets. And oral wisdom + verbatim memory were incredibly valued and highly trained skills, so these stories might not have been as distorted across generations as we might assume
We already know orcas spend their entire lives by the sides of the same group, and that the matriarch leader does in fact pass customs, culture, and practices to the next generations by word of mouth. And they likely have greater brainpower for remembrance than us, so who knows, the matriarchs could have books worth of knowledge all in their heads. (And yea parrots and octopus are smart but definitely not on the level of orcas)
There's actually some archaeologists/historians who argue early Chinese characters show influence from Cuneiform, and that both show simularities to neolithic protowriting systems in some of their symbols. Unfortunately they publish in french so i cant read their shit yet
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520385123?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed
Theres also evidence (discussed in above article) that huntergatherers in Europe 40k years ago had a protowriting system as complicated as the very, very early cuneiform writings.
I get kind of annoyed at how often communication on this site requires a person to cover every single possible thing that could be even somewhat related to what you're saying.
When I'm saying "they don't have a way of writing things down, they only have oral tradition" I am not saying "oral tradition bad" or "oral tradition not a useful method of giving on knawledge" - I even mention that Orcas DO pass on knowledge!
What I am saying is that "writing things down is pretty good for passing on knowledge and storing knowledge that isn't initially useful in a way that oral tradition can't". Oral tradition is rich and yadda yadda. It does not allow for long-term storage in the same way that written language.
Now I will get ahead of yet another thing I didn't write: Written language also has issues and is also not a perfect method of storage or anything. But it opens avenues oral tradition doesn't.
This is so tiring.
I wasn't arguing with anything you said, just adding on stuff I find fascinating, like the possibility that even without that tangible record they perhaps have passed complex information across centuries or even millenniums
It really depends on this concept of "smart", right? Even if orcas have the same brain capacity in physical/neurological terms, what distinguishes humans is the social aspect. When I say social, I mean thay we have constantly compounding social learning and concretizing that knowledge into technology (going back to sharpened spears tips or pieces of flint). This is the aspect which really sets humans apart, not necessarily the biology itself (though our brains have no doubt evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to depend on this social aspect).
If orcas had such time and ability to pass knowledge on not only through direct communication, but through communicated technology, they might have the same level of intelligence!
To be clear, I'm not making any normative claima about morality or such, I just don't want us to fall into the "biology determines smartness" idea which is undialectical and wrong. With my analysis, and a good normative ethics (which is like "treat beings as the best version of themselves that could exist given time and assistance") we could have a better take.