Secrets of the Social World: Inside the

Animal Mind (FULL VIDEO) (49:53)

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In this episode, Chris Packham focuses on one of the cleverest animals of all, the dolphin.
Swimming with a pod of dolphins in the Bahamas, Packham explores their language and sees
how they can recognize themselves in the mirror. He also witnesses the duplicity of chimps
and in a moving scene, watches elephants mourn their dead.

Item Number: 60468

Date Added: 12/10/2014

Type: Documentary Film

2014

Filed Under:
Animal Biology; General Biology; Introduction to Psychology
Producer:
BBC
This Video is Part of the Following Series:
Inside the Animal Mind

[MUSIC PLAYING]
What would it be like to be another animal? To know what they're thinking? To be inside the
animal mind?
[BIRD CAWING]
Perhaps the most intriguing minds are those of the cleverest animals. Elephants and their
phenomenal memories. Chimps and their ability to use tools. Crows that solve mind-bending
problems.
Take a look at this select group of intelligent animals, and you'll notice that they all have
something in common. They all live in groups. Could this mean that there is a relationship

between needing to navigate the hurly burly of a complex social life and actually being
clever?
In short, could being a social animal actually making you a more intelligent animal? We'll be
diving into the world of an animal that many people believe to be exceptional-- dolphins.
Most of the behavior that we see from dolphins is complicated because they are a complex
social animal.
We'll be using cutting edge technology to listen in on their conversations.
So here's an example of a signature [INAUDIBLE] from just one animal.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
And discovering their ability to recognize themselves.
They perform all sorts of odd behaviors, much like we might do in front of the mirror.
And by delving into the world of these animals, we'll learn more about the mind of the most
social animals of all. Us-- humans.
Bimini. The western-most island of the Bahamas, lying just 75 kilometers from Florida. The
crystal clear waters that surround it make the perfect home for an extremely social animal-dolphins.
Kathleen Dudzinski and Kell Sweetings are experts on the Atlantic spotted dolphin. They've
been studying the social lives of a group of 100 dolphins in the Bimini waters for over a
decade.
Our goal is actually to have the dolphins ignore us so that we can record their natural
behaviors in their environment and see what they're doing with each other as opposed to with
us.
Today, they're hoping to get in the water with some of the dolphins.
Hopefully we'll be able to see some dolphins, but they're wild animals, so it's hard to know.
We look for them, we watch the sea. We do the best we can.
The researchers identify individuals by their distinctive spot patterns. They now know the age
and sex of many of them.
No two dolphins have the same spot pattern. They're a bit like constellations in the sky. In
addition to the spots, we can use scars.
The team has spotted a group of dolphins. They get ready to dive in.
OK, Al. We're ready when you are.

The scientists are lucky and are quickly surrounded by a pod of 16 dolphins from the Bimini
group. They observe groups like this to look for clues that could reveal how dolphins interact
and what their relationships are.
Kathleen films everything, so if she sees any interesting social behavior she can study it in
more detail. The dolphins swarm around, creating bubbles with their tails. Then they do
something strange. They start to use their beaks to push each other through the water.
The dolphins' behavior is unusual. Kathleen and Kell have only seen it a few times.
What we definitely saw on this last entry was a socializing group of dolphins. They were
interacting, playing. They were affectionate with one another. There was a lot of rubbing, a
lot of sound. So you had a lot of signals.
It suggests to me there's some sort of interaction, it's some sort of observational learning
situation going on with that group.
Kathleen suspects that this social interaction may be a chance for the younger dolphins to
learn the rules of dolphin society.
Same with most other social animals. The youngsters need to learn what are the rules, what's
the etiquette of their society?
When you look at the dolphins' behavior from different angles, a surprising story of complex
social relationships emerges. What appeared to be a random ball of eight dolphins, actually
contains three friends that the researchers have encountered many times-- Billy, Tim, and
Split Jaw.
Dolphins have friendships and favorites. And that their social interactions are-- they have to
learn certain behaviors. So along those times, they're also developing the friendships that they
might have that might last a lifetime.
Dolphins cement the strong bond between each other by touching each other's pectoral fins.
Billy and Tim's association-- they're both 13 years old-- has lasted many years and they're
core members of the Bimini group.
Close relationships between dolphins aren't unusual. On other occasions, Kathleen and Kell
have noticed that females often start to hang out with other females of the same age when
they're pregnant. The researchers suspect they could be strengthening their bonds so that
when they have their calves, they already have a support network and potential babysitters.
White Blotch was one adult female that we saw very consistently for 10 years. And she was
notorious as what appeared to be a babysitter. She'd come to the boat with her own calf, and
she'd have two or three extras in tow. And we know they only have one calf at a time. So it
was a very clear example of that babysitting and taking turns.
Dolphins form all sorts of relationships and they change over time. It's a bustling social
world.

Their society is complex. The interactions that you see are very similar to other social
animals. But how they might be different because they're fully aquatic or because they have a
very streamlined body, that's what we're coming to know.
Scientists are still trying to understand the meaning of dolphins' social relationships. But
some advantages are obvious, especially when they band together to hunt.
In these shallow waters off the coast of Florida, individual dolphins find it hard to catch fastmoving fish. But watch what happens when they act as a group. One dolphin swims in a
circle. It whips up a wall of muddy water the corrals any fish inside.
Three wait, anticipating what the other is doing. The fish are driven right into their mouths.
Here, one comes around again to create another corral. They've cleverly worked out a highly
efficient way to catch fish. It's extraordinary group behavior, and it tells us much about the
ingenuity of the dolphin mind.
If they're cooperating, it means the dolphins can communicate with each other. They must
possess some kind of language. So is the language of social animals something we could ever
understand?
Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Home to some of the most social animals on the planet-elephants.
[ELEPHANT SOUNDS]
Not only are elephants extremely intelligent, they're also highly vocal. They use over a dozen
different types of call within their intricate social lives.
Karen McComb Professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Sussex, is trying to unlock
the secrets of elephant communication.
The thing about this park that's outstanding is the visibility of the elephants. Population more
than 1,000 elephants, which we know individually.
Elephants live in groups led by the oldest female, known as the matriarch. They are
constantly on the move, and this means they frequently encounter other groups. Sometimes
there are friendly relationships, but other times tensions erupt.
Karen is keen to tap into the elephant communication system to find out what the animals
know about each other.
One of the first things I want to do is really build up a picture of what proportion of the
population they really knew by voice.
So Karen has devised a clever experiment that involves some very powerful speakers.
[ELEPHANT SOUNDS]

Elephants make a particular type of sound called a contact call. They use it to keep in touch
across vast distances.
So the call we're using is one of the main social calls that's used to say, here am I, where are
you?
Karen has made a library of contact calls and is going to play them to a group of elephants.
Some recordings are of elephants familiar to the group, but some are strangers.
So basically when we play this call, it's like playing a vocal fingerprint of that elephant.
[ELEPHANT SOUNDS]
Others then have the opportunity to decide what they think about individual and react
accordingly.
Will they be able to distinguish between the calls of strangers and elephants they've
encountered before? Karen plays the group a call from an elephant they've never met before.
[ELEPHANT SOUNDS]
Listening. Well, the matriarch is listening. You can see she's holding her ears like a little bit
from the head.
The group moves closer together.
There is a bit of defensiveness here. There was bunching up within the group.
This is a subtle reaction, but often the group's response to the stranger's call is very obvious,
such as with this larger herd that Karen filmed on an earlier occasion.
[ELEPHANT SOUNDS]
The elephants stop to listen and then bunch up defensively.
When Karen plays elephants the call of an elephant they know well, their reaction is very
different. They remain relaxed. Their behavior doesn't change.
So elephants are able to distinguish between friend and stranger, simply through the different
sound of the contact calls. Karen has discovered that elephants are able to successfully
recognize up to 100 calls.
But that's not all.
What we find that was really interesting was that families differed in how good they were at
those tests. Groups that had older matriarchs were much, much better at these discrimination
tasks, at picking out those genuine strangers from more familiar ones and really only focusing
their defensive reactions when they needed to on those genuine strangers.

An average family will be capable of recognizing around 100 by voice. But with an older
matriarch, the number may be well in excess of that.
Karen's work tells us that elephants are able to keep track of the many other elephants in their
extensive societies. And those with the greatest amount of social information are the best at
making decisions which can affect survival.
Basically, that the matriarchs seem to be acting for the family as a repository of social
information. And if you were part of a family that had an older leader, you were capable of
making better decisions when you heard a call.
But however impressive elephant communication is, scientists have long suspected dolphin
language must be even more so. And if only they listen closely enough, they'd be able to
crack it.
Dolphin research really began in earnest in the 1960s, when one neuroscientist suspected
dolphins may be more intelligent than people had thought.
John Lilly was a neurophysiologist who was the first to really suggest that dolphins might be
highly intelligent. He was the first to really sort of light the fire and get a lot of us interested.
He talked about them as humans of the sea.
And I just want to talk to such an ancient characters and find out if they have any wisdom for
us.
Lilly thought the best way to do this was to have a person share their life with a dolphin.
So John Lilly did an experiment that involved building a dolphin house. And what he did was
he bought property and he flooded the first floor so the dolphin could actually live in this first
floor area.
The dolphin was a male called Peter. Lilly then persuaded 22-year-old Margaret Howe to live
with Peter full time for two and half months. No one knew what was going to happen.
Margaret lived, ate, and slept here. This photograph shows her on the phone while Peter
listens in. But much time spent trying to teach Peter English, two and half hours a day.
This is a sound recording of Peter attempting to repeat numbers spoken by Margaret.
Five, two three, four, five.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
One, two, three, four, five, six.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
It was slow progress, and keeping Peter focused was tricky. From early on in the experiment,
he started to make sexual advances towards his human companion. Highly aroused, he would
rub against her legs.

Margaret had to calm him down before proceeding with the lessons. Controversial enough,
but in another test, Lilly injected dolphins with the hallucinogenic drug LSD to see if it
helped learning. This was the 1960s, remember.
It's safe to say the dolphin house experiment to teach Peter to speak English was neither
ethical nor a success. Though Peter was able to imitate some sound patterns, he clearly had
no grasp of the English language.
What the dolphins did was not English. They repeated the burst pulses. In other words, they
could imitate the numbers of syllables that they were hearing, but they couldn't formulate
English. They don't have the same kind of system, articulatory system we have.
So while it was an interesting approach, it really wasn't very appropriate for dolphins.
But the pioneering work that John Lilly did certainly helped inspire both research and the
public with a fascination for dolphins. And crucially, it taught those researchers that any ideas
of teaching dolphins human language were complete fantasy.
That's why today scientists like Vincent Janick here in Florida prefer to study dolphins in the
wild. He's researching the sounds dolphins make to communicate. And he's using a
pioneering method of recording them.
We're going out today to try to find [INAUDIBLE] dolphins and tags to them, which are little
recording tags that can give us information about their sounds that they're making and also
give us information about the behavior as they're in the bay, their own wild environment.
A dolphin's been captured in shallow water. The team work rapidly to minimize distress to the
animal.
Are you gonna put the acoustic on?
Until now, it's been almost impossible to gather useful sound recordings of wild dolphins
because when in a group, you can't tell which one is making which sound. Vincent's solution
is to attach a recording device to the animal's head.
Nicholas. Nicholas. You got signal?
Roger that.
OK.
It will now record all the sounds and calls made by this individual dolphin while the team
keep record of its movements. In addition, the device transmits a signal so they can track the
dolphin and recover the unique data at the end.
Five, four, three, two, one.
The dolphin's released.

It's part of a bigger program, and several dolphins are tagged. At the same time, the scientists
are constantly observing them so later they can match their behavior to the sounds they're
making.
The device here measures the distance between the dolphins.
What's going on over there? Lots of splashing. I think that's a dorsal fin. Right behind-Yeah. There are two dolphins.
Two dolphins.
There's a variety of data that we're collecting here from the boat. What we can look at is what
the animal's doing. Whether it's traveling, whether it's foraging, whether it's socializing with
others. Those kinds of things we can observe from the surface.
The team has been tracking the dolphins for six hours. The recorder then automatically
detaches itself from the animal captured earlier and the team retrieve it. Back at base, the
sounds can be analyzed.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
At first listen, it's a cacophony, a whole range of dolphin sounds. A mixture of clicks,
whistles, and pulses.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
Half these sounds are not relevant to the study. They're used by the dolphins to find their way
around. They're called echolocation clicks. But Vincent's interested in these other ones,
sounds they use for communication. And one in particular.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
And there's one very fascinating sound, which is the signature whistle. And the signature
whistle is a call that, in a way, labels the identity of an animal. It's broadcasting who you are.
So here's an example of a signature form just one animal.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
Each dolphin has its own unique whistle. They're the only mammal, apart from humans, to
have this type of personalized call. They use it to stay in touch in murky water and to identify
themselves when they meet other dolphins at sea, just as we use names.
Yet the signature whistle is not fixed. If male dolphins change their alliances, they can alter
their signature whistle.
The sounds that they do produce, they can always bring in new modifications, new
improvisations, if you want. And so therefore, they're always able to somehow change the

sounds that they already have. So the range of sounds they're making and their repertoire is
very, very large. And also very adaptable to a new situation.
Vincent now believes it may be mistaken to think of this as a human type of language at all.
We see language, really, as the human communication system. And it's very specific to what
our needs are. There's other very complex communication systems out there. One other
example is music. We can use music to communicate about feelings, for example.
[DOLPHIN SOUNDS]
Vincent thinks the calls of dolphins could be a completely different type of communication.
How dolphins communicate may be yet a third way of complex communication. That is,
again, different for music and from language. And it's very important in the study of this to
keep an open mind and be broad, because if we were to look for language, we would actually
already, in a way, blink ourselves to other possibilities.
It may be many years, if ever, before scientists fully crack the dolphin code. But what is clear
is dolphins have developed a unique ability to communicate with each other. So how did they
get this ability?
Here at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, some of the world's leading experts on
dolphin evolution think they may have the answer. Lori Marino came to this subject through
her research as a neuroscientist measuring the brains of dolphins.
Modern dolphins have especially large brains and she and her colleague, Mark Uhen, wanted
to discover how this came about.
The $6 million question has always been why do dolphins have such large brains? And one of
the things that we wanted to find out with this research was exactly when they got their large
brains.
To find the answer, Lori turned to fossil skulls from the ancestors of today's dolphins.
Scientists have found fossils that trace the line of dolphin evolution over nearly 50 million
years. The space where the brain is housed, the cranial capacity, is often filled with sediment.
But Lori and Mark use a CT scanner to see through the sediment and work out the exact
dimensions. Scanning the fossil skulls told the scientists how dolphin brain size has changed
over time.
We we're absolutely thrilled to see the results of the study, because it gave us information no
one had before.
The results revealed exactly when dolphins got their large brains.
The earliest dolphin ancestors, the archaeocytes, were very different from today's dolphins.
They were huge, ferocious animals with large teeth. Scientists believe they were solitary
creatures.

We don't think that they were very social. And they certainly didn't have any reason to be. But
then something happened and what we see is a shift so that when they died out and the early
modern forms came in, they're a very different animal.
Smaller body, different dentition, larger brains. And adopting a very, very different lifestyle.
More social.
So around 34 million years ago, bodies got smaller and brains got bigger. No one knows
exactly what caused the dolphins to become smaller and lose their formidable teeth. But Lori
believes that these changes meant they had to start living in groups in order to defend
themselves.
There was a change in their ecology such that perhaps they needed to hunt together. Perhaps
they needed to band together against predators. So these new animals were smaller and not as
formidable as the archaeocytes. So they kind of needed each other.
And being part of a group has a remarkable effect on your brain size.
When you're a social animal, there's a lot that you need to keep track of. There's all kinds of
relationships, all kinds of interactions, hierarchies, collaborations that may occur. And all of
that requires a very large brain to keep track of all of that.
It seems that the driver of the large relative brain size was social complexity. And what a
driver it was. Remarkably, for over 30 million years, until early humans came on the scene,
these dolphins had the most powerful brain on the planet.
Lori's work strongly suggests that there's a link between social living and having a larger
brain. It appears that needing to understand, to relate to other individuals in that social group,
is actually driving the evolution of a more powerful, more complex brain.
And a complex brain allows animals to carry out very sophisticated behavior.
Here, at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, animal psychologist Diana Reiss is
investigating whether dolphins have an ability that has only been observed in a select group
of social animals.
Keeping dolphins in captivity is controversial, and since 1988 aquariums in the United States
agreed not to take dolphins from the wild except for the occasional stranding. Any new
dolphins are captive-born.
Diana believes it's only in the controlled environment of aquariums you can unlock some of
the secrets of the dolphin mind. Here she can carry out experiments not possible in the wild.
The aquarium has an observation chamber nicknamed the Pit. It's cramped, but you get
excellent views of what the dolphins are doing.
It's a beautiful bubble ring.

These dolphins have learned to make their own bubble rings. A clever enough trick, but
Diana wants to investigate something far more fundamental. Do dolphins recognize
themselves as individuals?
It was long assumed only the human mind was capable of this, but now we know a tiny
handful of other animals can do it too. Diana places a one-way mirror inside the observation
window to test the dolphins.
So now we're looking through a window, and they'll be seeing a mirror.
Dolphins don't behave like this, staying in one place and staring, if they simply meet another
dolphin. This suggests they understand that what they're seeing isn't another animal but a
reflection of themselves.
One action never normally seen is this curious fin-wiggling. It's an example of what scientists
call self-directed-- things the dolphins only do when they're looking in the mirror. Other selfdirected behaviors, including looking inside their mouths and twisting to see their belly. They
are using the mirror like a tool to look at parts of their own bodies they usually can't see.
This looks nothing like what they do when they're socially interacting with another. They
perform all sorts of odd behaviors, much like we might do in front of the mirror to see what
we look like when we do that new dance step or when we just want to see how we look in a
new outfit or what we look like when we do a certain behavior. So it's striking to see these
things.
And Diana has observed the dolphins using the mirror for another purpose. This remarkable
footage of them having sex was also filmed through a one-way mirror.
They came to the mirror, and they looked head on into the mirror. And would copulate while
they both looked in the mirror and watched.
This is something they can't see without a mirror, so this is very sophisticated. This is
understanding it's you and understanding this mirror is a tool to view yourself. This all
supports the idea that dolphins must be aware they're looking at themselves.
Dolphins share this ability to recognize themselves as individuals with very few other
animals. Elephants can do. Chimpanzees can do it. But the vast majority, including dogs and
monkeys, can't.
And interestingly, nor can young humans. Before they're 18 months old, most children fail to
point out a red dot painted on their cheek. This boy assumes he's looking at another child.
Only when they're about two do children first realize the mark is on their own cheek. They
now know the reflection is of themselves.
Social animals haven't evolved this ability to recognize themselves merely to preen in
mirrors. Understanding yourself as an individual means you know others are individuals too.
[CHIMP SOUNDS]

And here, at the Yerkes Primate Center in Georgia, USA, scientists are working with some of
the most intelligent animals to find out how far this ability can go.
[CHIMP SOUNDS]
When an animal like a chimpanzee is aware that another in their group might have a different
perspective on the world, it gives them an advantage. It allows the chimp to lie and
manipulate others.
Primatologist Frans de Waal coined the phrase "chimpanzee politics." He and his team have
set up an ingenious experiment to reveal how a low-ranking animal can deceive a more
dominant member of the group.
Most studies that are on deception are observational anecdotal studies. But nowadays we do
experiments, also, on it. And so you can, for example, hide food. One chimp knows where it
is, the other one doesn't know where it is. And then you can see if deception goes on between
them.
The experiment involves two chimps-- Rita and Missy. Rita is more dominant than Missy.
At the start of the experiment, the chimps are in their sleeping quarters. One of the keepers
goes into the outdoor enclosure and hides a banana under the red tube. Crucially, Missy is
allowed to watch through a window, so she sees the keeper hide the banana.
Then they let the chimps out. Rita, the dominant chimp, comes out first. If she knew where
the banana was, she'd simply help herself. But only Missy, the subordinate, saw the banana
being hidden under the red tube. So the two you have very different perspectives on the same
situation.
Missy notices Rita close to the food and tries to appear nonchalant. Rita now wanders off.
When she's far enough away, Missy goes for the banana. She successfully deceived Rita.
Frans has observed this behavior in chimps, but it's rare in other animals.
That kind of deception is not so typical. Probably dolphins are capable of it and elephants, but
you need a larger brain, I think, to do this kind of thing.
Deception reveals much about the minds of animals. They must be able to plan, and they
have to anticipate that their own actions will influence events.
When we think about deception, you have to sort of understand the rules of the game.
Deception is manipulating the rules of the game. So a highly social animal who understands
the rules of the game and then changes it somehow for its own benefit or to make a joke
perhaps or to achieve something, shows a level of sophistication.
We humans are very good at it. Perhaps the most successful animals are the natural born liars.
But social living is not just about lies and deceit. Deception can only get you so far.

There's a big disadvantage to deception. And that's why it is not so often used. Is that if I do
that too often to you, you may catch on. And at some point you don't trust me anymore.
Frans also wanted to test if animals had a sense of justice. Would they realize when they were
being treated fairly?
Frans began the fairness test with a Capuchin monkey. These small, clever animals are kept in
large enclosures. But for the short duration of the test, they're brought into a lab.
Each monkey carries out the simple task for a reward. Frans is testing to see what happens
when two animals are given different rewards. First, they both get cucumber and everyone's
happy.
But watch what happens when the one on the right receives a far sweeter reward-- a grape.
And if you start giving one of them grapes, which are far better than cucumber, then the one
who gets cucumber becomes very upset and becomes agitated, emotionally agitated.
Normally you would think the only thing an animal should care about is what do I get for my
task. I work, I get rewards. But no. They're comparing this what the other one is getting.
Chimpanzees go further. Sometimes. Not always. But the chimpanzee who gets the grape will
refuse til the other one also gets a grape. So that gets very close to the human sense of
fairness.
The ability to forge a friendship, to communicate with others in the group, to know yourself
as an individual, to have a sense of fairness, and occasionally to deceive and lie-- these skills
don't required strength so much as a prodigious amount of brain power.
And the brainier you are, the more likely it is you will succeed within the group and pass
your intelligence on to your offspring. This is why social living has driven the evolution of
high intelligence.
But it's not just cleverness that differentiates social animals. Animals with minds like these
seem to be able to put themselves in the shoes of another individual-- a trait we call empathy
and which we always tended to consider to be uniquely human.
But now researchers are exploring how other social animals display behaviors akin to
empathy. Here in Amboseli, the elephants display an extraordinary behavior that seems to be
unique among non-human animals.
Elephants, through observational evidence, seem to have a really unusual interest in the dead
of their own species, either fresh carcasses or skulls. The very interesting thing is actually the
interest seems to persist after death.
Karen wants to find out more about this unusual behavior and so she's devised an experiment.
She takes the skulls of elephants killed by poachers to make a miniature elephant graveyard
in the path of an approaching herd. Now she just observes.

Yeah. I think we've definitely got the beginnings of a reaction here. The male is swinging his
trunk towards the skulls and the jawbones. Some of the younger females starting to respond
as well. They've picked up a whiff of the skulls.
A few animals, including chimps, will be curious towards the corpse of a companion,
touching and investigating the body. But only elephants take an interest in skulls and bones of
their own kind long after death.
Now we're really starting to get a reaction. We've got the females clustering in around the
skulls and they're touching the jawbones. You see the way the ends of the trunks are moist
there. That's enhancing the scent that they are getting.
You wouldn't see that in any other species except for humans.
To test whether this intense response was specific to elephant skulls and not just a reaction to
a novel object, Karen has done exactly the same thing with skulls from other animals.
If you present elephants with the skulls of other large herbivores and the biggest herbivores
you get can-- rhino, buffalo skulls-- you do not get that level of interest. Given a choice
between the three, they make a beeline for the elephant skull.
They are definitely able recognize, distinguish, the skulls and other remains of elephants from
other species.
This interest in the deceased is a trait which elephants share with only one other animal-- us.
Obviously we are intensely involved and interested in death and the sense that our
relationships continue beyond that. And it's very interesting that this highly social animal
seems to also have social interest that extends beyond death.
If social animals can experience such a deep emotional connection with one another, how far
could these feelings extend? Well, in early 2013, a remarkable incident was filmed off Hawaii
that may provide some answers.
A male dolphin has fishing line and a hook caught on its body. Without anything being done,
he might well die. But the dolphin swims into a group of divers.
When we stop to think about it, this animal must know he's in danger. Might he also realize
that the humans, instead of harming him, might actually help?
In other words, could this dolphin be taking a calculated risk that these people could show
pity for his plight? The dolphin survived-- an extraordinary example of empathy crossing the
species barrier.
The highly social animals demonstrate incredible abilities to realize that other individuals
have separate thoughts, to see the world from another perspective, and even to empathize.
Abilities we perhaps considered to be uniquely human, these traits have evolved in the social
animals driven by the demands of living as part of a group.

The general characteristic of being sensitive to the moods of others, I think, is quite beneficial
for social animals.
Superficially, we couldn't be more different from these animals. We inhabit completely
different environments. But in the way that we all use our brains to deal with others, there are
clear similarities.
The common factor between cetaceans and primates is social complexity. Both groups are
socially complex. And so what's really interesting is you have two very different groups of
animals, but they might have been driven by very similar selection pressures.
Maybe mentally we're a lot closer to these animals than we ever imagined.
[MUSIC PLAYING]