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Such compression of large amounts of information into a few exformation-rich macrostates with small quantities of nominal information are not only intelligent: they are very beautiful: yes, even sexy. Seing a jumble of confused data and shreds of rote learning compressed into a concise, clear message can be a real turn-on.

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Hal Whitehead

A bunch of individuals do the same thing because they learned from watching each other or somebody else. That's what we would call culture.

Culture, Individual, Same, Somebody, Watching
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Studying the behavior of large whales has been likened to astronomy. The observer glimpses his subjects, often at long range; he cannot do experiments, and he must continually try to infer from data that are usually inadequate.

Astronomy, Behavior, Glimpses, Large, Studying, Usually

What I mean by it, and roughly what most biologists who talk about culture mean by it, is either behavior itself, or information that leads to behavior. Information that is picked up through social learning - so, from being with, watching, being taught by others. It's a way that individuals behave or get information about how they will behave that comes directly from the behavior of others.

Behavior, Culture, Directly, Mean, Taught, Way

It's kind of ironic that when you look at the evidence of intelligence and so on, a lot of it is anecdotal. A lot of it is, "Well, we saw this dolphin do this extraordinary thing," or, "We screwed up with our apparatus, and then the dolphins did this. " And so it seems to me that the more we can actually watch them doing their thing, the better chance we'll have of making some sense of them.

Actually, Chance, Evidence, Ironic, Kind, Watch

Religion's pretty pervasive in humans. And why it's pervasive in humans is debated a lot. There are indications of things that look like religion in other animals, like chimps doing rain dances, and that sort of thing. Actually, I say that, but there's that and not much else.

Actually, Animal, Debated, Look, Rain, Things

But one thing that seems pretty clear when we look at human religion is that it's highly tied in with human culture. So if, as seems to be the case, culture's governing a lot of what whales do, it's perhaps not an unreasonable hypothesis to think that it's got elements of. . . what I guess you'd call the supernatural.

Culture, Religion, Think, Thinking, Tied, Whales
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