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In Search of Dolphin Realities
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14442 |
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NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
3,241 Words |
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John C. Lilly with Barbara J. Clarke
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"The dolphin," wrote Pliny the Elder in his Historia Naturalis (A.D. 23), "is an animal that is not only friendly to making but is also a lover of music, and can be charmed by singing in harmony, but particularly by the sound of the water organ. It is not afraid of a human being as something strange but comes to meet vessels at sea and sports and gambols round them actually trying to race them and passing them even when under full sail." He continues on to describe the oft-told tale of "dolphin-rescues-boy," a constant in dolphin legends through the ages.
Almost 400 years earlier, Aristotle made many pertinent observations about dolphins in his Historia Animalia, including that they bear their young alive, suckle them, breathe air, and communicate by underwater sounds. He goes so far as to say, "The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels but have difficulties with consonants." The ancient Greeks named a constellation (Delphys) and an oracle (Delphi--dedicated to the earth goddess, Gaia) after the dolphin. In many ways it seems as if the Greeks had a late twentieth-century view of these animals.
The religious monotheism of the Middle Ages placed man in a separate compartment, above all other living creatures. This religious viewpoint put down man's instincts, which religion labeled "the beast in man." A pejorative view of animals, as beings of lesser importance and intelligence than man, grew. Not until the nineteenth century, partly due to Darwin's classic work on evolution, did biologists begin to deny such projections and stake out the territory of the objective, noninvolved scientific observer.
This attitude continued until quite recently. Zoologists who studied captive animals acted as if their presence and the captivity of the animal had no effect on the behavior and day-to-day functioning of the animals. These unconscious beliefs in the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of scientists in regard to the other animals is slowly but surely disappearing. The modern view of an ecosystem in which man is a coordinated part of the total biosphere is reducing these unconscious beliefs and their influence on our thinking.
Mental Abilities
So who are these seagoing, air-breathing, and large-brained mammals that have been around in their present evolution for approximately 30 million years? Dolphins are mammals of the order Cetacea (fishlike mammals), the suborder Odontoceti (those with teeth), and the family Delphinidae (dolphins and porpoises). Within the Delphinidae, there are some 22 genera and upward of 55 species.
Among the large variety of dolphins and toothed whales, there is a broad spectrum of brain size. Under my direction at the Communication Research Institute in Miami, careful studies of larger cetacean brains by Peter J. Morgane, Paul Yakovlev, and Sam Jacobs showed that these brains are enlarged only in the associational silent cortex--the "macrocomputer." In the largest of the cetacean brains, the macrocomputer is all that has been added to the mass of the brain. The sensorimotor cortex--the "minicomputer"--corresponds to that of the small cetacean species. The cellular neuronal networks are essentially the same as those of the human. Therefore, we deduced that the human-sized brains in cetaceans correspond to human mental
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