Dolphins Call Each Other By Name

From that excerpt, all the parrot can tell is if two objects are the same color or not.

Not really: the parrot must have an internal representation of 'color' as something (a concept / quality) that can be had and shared between things. It (hm, s/he) must therefore understand that it is (it must represent it as) an abstract quality in the sense that it can be had by different things (likewise with 'shape').

Well so what? This entails (I would argue) that it has the capacity to store and operate on abstract things (more or less the definition of 'symbol') - and in this very sense, the parrot has the faculty for symbolic processing/operations. Not only does it extract properties from sensory data and generalize them into concepts (things can be wibbly-wobbly-in-way-A, or wibbly-wobbly-in-way-B (first order of abstraction (well, n+1 really)) => things have wibbliness, and some things have the same kind of wibbliness (second order (or n+2))), but also, it may operate on these concepts and use them in assertion/negation propositions: some objects have the same color but not the same shape. (I use the term proposition in the more general logical sense, not necessarily as in 'a linguistic assertion'; but when asked, the parrot provides an answer that can be put in a truth-table so to speak.)

Interestingly, that's one of the ways to actually define 'semantic content': something which provides truth-conditions (e.g. some language-formalizing systems would say that the proposition "The present King of France is bald" has no semantic content / has no meaning because it is neither true nor false (presently there is no King in France, and the reference fails) (though Russell would disagree ('how can it be neither true nor false?') (if interested: "On Denoting", 1905.))

So what #2? Well, one could argue that symbolic apparatus + semantics (a set of truth-functions / grounds for constructing them) => 'language', so it's kind of a big thing, I'd say. (At the very least, evidence towards abstract thought in animals is always somehow very interesting for me.) Again: symbols (abstracting from properties => projecting these abstracts back onto sensory data) + symbolic processing (basically, ability to ascribe truth/falsity to/via them) => darn interesting. There's a whole hot debate how/whether this can be achieved 'bottom-up' from neural networks (Connectionism) (is 'symbolic processing' the proper way of reduction? Even if cognition is 'symbolic' in the end, perhaps it is best to model this starting bottom-up and arriving at 'symb.processing' as an emergent/epiphenomenal capacity?) - or, whether you need 'innate capacity' for symbolic processing / language ('language genes') - top-bottom language faculties (that all add up to those same neural networks, but simply, you won't get much by starting bottom-up) (Classicism / Nativism (not really interchangeable, using loosely / generalizing, etc.))

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ConDeb , http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/#ShaConBetCo... , etc.)

edit fixed and added even more confusing stuff.

Yes but dolphins are not selectively breeded for domestication. At all. They are anti-domesticated in fact.

If a killer whale attacks or kills a people in a zoo, (and this accidents happen) this whale is not killed and is maintained in breeding programs, as its sons. Too much expensive animal to lose its genes.

I would quote a passage from an online novel:

" In the beginning, before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like human intelligence evolved so that we could invent better tools.

The reason why this was crazy was that only one person in the tribe had to invent a tool, and then everyone else would use it, and it would spread to other tribes, and still be used by their descendants a hundred years later. That was great from the perspective of scientific progress, but in evolutionary terms, it meant that the person who invented something didn't have much of a fitness advantage, didn't have all that many more children than everyone else. Only relative fitness advantages could increase the relative frequency of a gene in the population, and drive some lonely mutation to the point where it was universal and everyone had it. And brilliant inventions just weren't common enough to provide the sort of consistent selection pressure it took to promote a mutation. It was a natural guess, if you looked at humans with their guns and tanks and nuclear weapons and compared them to chimpanzees, that the intelligence was there to make the technology. A natural guess, but wrong.

Before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like the climate changed, and tribes had to migrate, and people had to become smarter in order to solve all the novel problems.

But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.

Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity. "

- http://hpmor.com/chapter/24