The conference was winding down, and most attendees were heading home. But at a far end of the convention center in downtown San Diego last year, one room had drawn a late crowd: Two preeminent cetacean scientists were arguing that dolphins were too smart, and way too much like us, to capture or kill. At the high-profile annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conferring what amounted to personhood on dolphins was a professionally risky act.
Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and cetacean expert at Emory University, kicked things off, her soft features belying her outsize thesis: Pound for pound, dolphins are better endowed with gray matter than most primates, falling just short of humans, and the neocortex of their brain is just as complex as our own. Marino’s former mentor and close friend, Diana Reiss, a dolphin researcher at Hunter College in New York City, spoke ...
