Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Lets play with that stupidity...

re: Lets play with that
TB — (archived)

Your insults don't bother me, and your analogy is suspect.

I can't live in a city and still avoid all passing strangers' cars. But it would be pretty damn easy to keep from getting close to strange cars if I lived in a farmhouse in the middle of the Kansas prairie.

Tell me how many sailing vessels there were--of ALL kinds--during the commercial whaling heyday of the 18th and 19th centuries. How fast did they go? How hard would they have been to avoid in the open sea?

Anything with true intelligence should have adapted quite quickly. Hell, even normal wild animals of reasonable intelligence soon learn to avoid all humans when humans first enter their areas and start hunting.

I could cut through all this crap by citing actual science on cetacean brain systems and intelligence. Do I really have to? All I'm saying is that whales do not exhibit much in the way of planning, adaptation to new conditions, communication of complex ideas, or any of the other aspects of human intelligence that would have allowed them to do a much better job of avoiding what should have been, through most of our history, a rather easily-avoided threat.

I'm glad you like whales and like watching them in the wild. I like whales too (although I don't get along well on small boats) and think hunting them is unnecessary. But let's not get romantic about it.

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