Hey readers,
Happy new year! If you've been with us for a while, you'll know that we've been playing around with different ways to curate the most interesting developments in the spaces we cover. I'm pleased to introduce you to a more well-rounded Friday newsletter that's full of the stuff you love. Here, you'll see more thorough highlights of our work, a subscriber-exclusive Q&A, and more concise roundups of what we're enjoying.
In other (literal) news, the Future Perfect team has been working hard, covering the latest in AI developments, economic policy, and trends we think will happen in 2023. In audioland, Future Perfect’s Sigal Samuel interviewed the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on Sean Illing’s The Gray Area podcast, while Kenny Torrella appeared on Vox’s Today, Explained to talk lab-grown meat.
As always, we love to hear what you're thinking. Don't be afraid to shoot us an email at futureperfect@vox.com about what you're enjoying and what you'd like to see more of.
— Kelsey Piper, senior writer
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Q&A: Can a dolphin be a person? |
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images |
Whales, dolphins, and humans all have large brains relative to the size of their bodies. These brains evolved to enable whales and dolphins to live in social groups and survive in the ocean. (Humans, well, have big brains, but we haven’t quite figured out how to keep oceans safe for marine life.) In part because of their high degree of intelligence, whales and dolphins experience changes in behavior, including self-mutilation, when confined in marine parks and aquariums over long periods of time. Today, 3,000 whales and dolphins are estimated to be in captivity worldwide, even as their future in the ocean is under threat from industrial fishing and climate change.
Neuroscientist Lori Marino is working to untangle whale and dolphin intelligence — and what it means for our responsibility to protecting their lives and well-being. As president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, she’s also helping to build the first North American ocean-side sanctuary for cetaceans who have previously been held in captivity. —Julieta Cardenas, Future Perfect fellow
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Can you describe key differences in the brain structure of a whale versus a human? What does that mean for how they process feelings and concepts?
The brain of whales and dolphins is different from the human brain in a couple of interesting ways, but mainly it has to do with how they process sensory information and how we process it.
They have a cortex on the outer part of the brain that receives and organizes auditory information, in particular, and visual information in a different way than humans. Whereas humans have one place in the brain where information comes from the ear to the cortex, they have two. We discovered that in 2015, so we don't even know what that's like, but they can echolocate on something, and then they can also see it in their mind, and vice versa, and that's something that just allows them to do so many things that we can't.
What might the evolutionary future hold for whales? Their ancestor of 50 million years ago, the pakicetus, was a land animal with hooves and fur. Will climate change signal the end for whales, or are adaptations likely to occur over the longer term?
I don't think anyone knows. Our species is really putting a lot of pressure on dolphins and whales in terms of their environment. I don't know if they can quickly enough develop evolutionary adaptations. The unfortunate possibility is that a lot of them may go extinct, and we see this already. We see the Chinese river dolphin. We see the little vaquita. A lot of dolphin and whale species are on the brink of extinction because of us.
They are highly intelligent, creative beings. but they're also very cultural beings. When you have an impact on their environment, it could impact their culture in a way that really disrupts their social organization. Then once you do that, you're on your way to extinction, and we see that in the southern resident [orcas]. The southern residents are in Washington state — there's only 73 left, I believe. And it's because they're not getting salmon and that's their culture. There's just sort of a perfect storm. I think some will come out of it, but I don't know if all will.
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Your research has contributed greatly to what we know about whale minds, and with this knowledge comes the responsibility to advocate for them as non-human persons. Can you tell us about what legislation like the Jane Goodall Act in Canada, or the SWIMS Act in the US would do if passed?
The SWIMS Act would essentially end captivity for certain species of cetaceans: orcas, beluga whales, pilot whales, false killer whales. It would do that by prohibiting breeding and import [for public display]. Those are the two things [that] need to be prohibited in order to phase out this whole entertainment industry. It is making the rounds, and we'll see what happens, but I think it has tremendous potential to really have an impact.
Going up to Canada, the Jane Goodall bill sort of comes on the heels of the Ending the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act, which passed in 2019; essentially, [it] made it illegal to use some whales for entertainment. [The] Jane Goodall bill goes a little further because it expands to other wild species captive in zoos, for instance. It would essentially provide more protection for wild animals, big cats, bears, etc., even reptiles who are kept in zoos. The idea would be to work with the accredited zoos to get some of the roadside zoos out of the picture.
What are the ambitions for the Whale Sanctuary Project?
What we hope is to eventually have orcas and beluga whales in our sanctuary. This isn't just about giving a better life to a few whales. We want this to become an example of an alternative to keeping these animals in entertainment parks. The difference is that there's no breeding. Eventually in the future, what we would like to see is no dolphins and whales in captivity — that they all should be in the ocean where they evolved.
We're hoping that the modeling of an alternative as a sanctuary becomes something that shifts the way we relate to these animals. It's important to actually create these sanctuaries, because it's one thing to talk about how bad the lives are of animals in entertainment parks. But it's even more important to say, okay, now, this is what we can do about it. |
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The bitter civil war dividing American veterinarians |
Human society has a paradoxical relationship with nonhuman animals, one where love and companionship sits next to commodification and killing — and veterinary medicine is in the middle of it. Today, most US veterinarians spend their time caring for companion animals, like cats, dogs, and other pets. But the profession’s history is intertwined with the meat industry, which means vets are also complicit in supporting policies that allow factory farms to mass kill animals with heatstroke — essentially cooking them to death. Future Perfect’s Marina Bolotnikova spoke to the vets who are fighting against their profession’s involvement in cruel Big Meat practices.
“I’ve been working hard on this story since long before I joined Vox in November, and I’m delighted it could find a home in a section where it fits so well,” said Bolotnikova. “At Future Perfect, we’re obsessed with thinking about how to create social change. But with factory farming, change is so hard to come by. All the traditional approaches have had depressingly limited results, so I’m always thinking about what novel strategies we should cover. This fascinating fight within the veterinary profession, if successful, could actually help move the needle."
More on this topic from Vox: |
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The treaties that make the world safer are struggling |
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images |
Right now, the arms control movement is facing something of a tough moment. The war in Ukraine certainly isn’t helping. But as technology advances, disinformation spreads, and geopolitics shift, especially with the rise of authoritarians and anti-democratic forces, arms control matters, even if prospects for major successes are bleak, or such agreements are sometimes violated. Senior foreign policy reporter Jen Kirby, who reported the story from the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) Review Conference in Geneva late last year, explains what risk reduction looks like in today’s day and age.
“I went to talk with experts and officials about what some of those threats are, and how technology and scientific advances are transforming what we even consider a bioweapon in 2023 — you know, really freak myself out ahead of the new year!” said Kirby. “But in a lot of my conversations, people were generally frustrated with progress on the BWC, and expressed a deeper pessimism with the state of nonproliferation and other multilateral disarmament efforts. And so, I wanted to try to figure out what was up, and why — even if the BWC RevCon managed to exceed (what were admittedly pretty low) expectations.”
More on this topic from Vox:
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The Swedish startup Oatly made oat milk cool, but it’s been a victim of its own success: It’s struggled to meet demand, leaving room for imitators to snatch up market share. Now it’s handing over the keys to much of its production to a Canadian manufacturing company that promises Oatly “will never again miss demand.” That could help its stock, which began at $17 and sank below $2 in recent months, recover. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer
For years after the Great Recession of 2008, the US economy had a problem: not enough demand. So it made sense that Washington’s fiscal and monetary policy in the aftermath was focused around boosting demand in every way possible. But as Eric Levitz points out in this smart New York magazine piece, what we lack now is supply of just about everything — and fixing the economy, not to mention achieving their own goals, will require progressives to rethink some of their basic assumptions. —Bryan Walsh, editor
I’ve written about studies that found surprisingly negative effects from pre-K programs on kids’ learning, so it seems only fair I mention a major new study in Boston finding that pre-K is very helpful. The authors exploit a lottery system used to allocate places in the city's public pre-K program, and find that pre-K attendees were more likely to graduate high school and go to college. Boys in particular got a big boost. —Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent
In the United Kingdom, young workers, aged 16 to 24, are staying out of the workforce due to long-term illness, including mental illness, depression, and anxiety. This story by Liza Tetley — in one of this week's Bloomberg Prognosis newsletters — identifies the reasons Gen Z’s mental health is declining and warns of the economic effects. “Given the strong correlation between mental health disorders and worklessness, a rise among Britain’s youth has direct economic consequences,” writes Tetley. —Rachel DuRose, fellow
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