The search for intelligent life is looking in the wrong direction. There are billions of stars in our galaxy, some of them older than our sun and with Earth-like planets orbiting around them. Hypothetically, these other solar systems could have started their development of intelligent life billions of years before ours. So, why haven’t we found evidence of any other advanced civilizations? Are the conditions on Earth so unique that life really could only arise here? Maybe.
If that is the case, intelligent life is an anomaly that could only thrive under particular and coincidental conditions that Earth has supplied. Humans are not the only species that have formed intelligence in this “goldilocks melting pot” of conditions. Perhaps centuries of human-centered thinking have prevented us from beginning to understand the intelligence of other species here on Earth.
We must look down into the ocean before we look to the stars: in recent years, scientists have questioned what have fundamentally been understood to be human traits. We are on the precipice of understanding modes of intelligence, consciousness and communication in species other than humans. But what does that mean for people and the assumptions of anthropocentrism? We as humans are less unique than we thought, and as we break down the barriers of what it means to be human, our responsibility for biodiversity conservation increases.
Cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — are at the forefront of this barrier-breaking research for two important reasons. First, recent advances in technology enable deeper understanding of cetacean behavior. Bioacoustics, artificial intelligence, drones and movement tags have delivered an onslaught of information about the underwater world. Second, due to this ability to better study cetaceans, we have come to understand that cetaceans live socially complex lives that require elaborate communication systems. Various examples within cetacean communication, including cultural transmission and the duality of patterning, illustrate that the old rules about what defines humans exclusively need to be reexamined.
Let’s dive into cultural transmission. Culture can be defined as behavior that is shared via social learning from members of a community. Once thought to be exclusive to humans, a recent explosion of research has provided the basis to believe that culture and social transmission exist in a variety of different animals, including some insects, birds, fish and mammals. Learning from unrelated individuals in a population rather than from parents is called horizontal transmission. Because horizontal transmission involves learning from peers, it is a good indicator of cross-cultural diffusion.
For example, humpback whale songs are disseminated beyond individual populations. Within the span of a lifetime, individual whales not only engage with members of other populations, but also learn from them. The significance of this phenomenon is that, like us, humpback whales must have the capacity for memory, rapid learning, syntax, and vocal complexity in order for this to happen.
Diving even deeper, new groundbreaking research indicates that various whales change their vocalization frequency in response to food availability, opening the door to the possibility that some whale species could learn these new vocalizations from other members of their population within a couple of years. Even more exciting, the paper suggests that because these different whale species produce sounds in the hearing range of the other species, that these whales may even be subliminally broadcasting messages about food availability across species. For example, blue whales may change their vocalization frequency in response to less krill availability to alert other blue whales, but humpback whales, which also feed heavily on krill and vocalize in a similar frequency range, may be able to hear blue whale vocalizations as well.
Like culture, language — in particular, the way it is constructed — was previously thought to be a distinctly human trait. Humans are able to form speech by breaking down words into letters that correspond with an affiliated sound. If you have the letters C, A, S and T, they are meaningless until combined into a word like “cast,” “scat” or “cats.” This phenomenon is called the duality of patterning. It’s humans’ linguistic ability to combine separate building blocks into something larger: a word has a meaning that is different than the sum of its parts. Duality of patterning was thought to be a distinctly human trait that reinforces the idea that only humans are capable of language.
That was the case until a 2024 development in the understanding of sperm whale echolocation. This discovery suggested that these whales have the sound coding prerequisites for duality of patterning to occur. The almost science fiction-sounding implications of this are that sperm whales have their own alphabet. If they have an alphabet that they can use to form words, they can hold conversations within their tight-knit social groups. If we humans can decipher their alphabet, we may be able to one day hold our own conversations with a sperm whale.
Stepping back on land for a second, what does this mean for us as humans? If these other species possess so-called human features, then don’t they warrant the same ethical considerations as humans? If people can understand what they have in common with an animal that is seemingly so alien on the surface, it would allow for a greater extension of empathy. And we know from existing research that humans are able to be more empathetic toward species that have been anthropomorphized.
Let’s build on this to expand our idea of what it means to be intelligent and to rally support for cetacean conservation. Consider the proposition to give whales legal personhood in Aotearoa New Zealand. This could be a start to dismantle the human-centered mindset for the conservation of marine species. In many Indigenous cultures, including Māori and many Polynesian groups, whales are already acknowledged as sentient beings.
The expansion of knowledge of cetacean communication supports what some Indigenous people have already believed for centuries. Now is a perfect time to support their efforts.
Avery Ancell has worked with whales from the Southeast Passage of Alaska to the East Coast of New Zealand, and is pursuing a graduate degree in conservation leadership at Colorado State University.
Banner image: Sperm whale swimming off the coast of Sri Lanka. Image © Paul Hilton / Greenpeace.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: A researcher discusses whale song, culture and conservation, listen here:
See related articles:
Animals have culture, too, and for some it’s crucial to their survival and conservation
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