Within the next decade or two the human species will establish communication with another species; nonhuman, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine; but definitely highly intelligent, perhaps even intellectual.
DR. JOHN C. LILLY, Man and Dolphin
DR. JOHN C. LILLY, a fascinating combination of characteristics, had the mind of a scientist, the heart of a mystic, and the vision of genius. Unfortunately, it never really came together. A neurologist, Dr. Lilly spent much of his life mapping the brains of various animal species, particularly dolphins, in an effort to understand how communication could take place between humans and a nonhuman intelligence. In mapping the brains of dolphins, he drove metal electrodes into the brain itself, then measured the electrical response to various stimuli. Much of Dr. Lilly’s work was done for NASA. The United States had begun blasting rockets into space, and contact with an alien intelligence was thought to be imminent. The question arose: How do you talk to an alien intelligence? Nobody knew. So the problem was given to Dr. Lilly, along with lucrative government grants.
Dr. Lilly’s driving passion was to communicate with animals. He wanted to discover their language, if they had one, and to learn what they had to say. His first book, Man and Dolphin, suggested that dolphins might be our intellectual superiors. Dr. Lilly’s speculations were based on brain measurements and tests, plus an imagination that was reputed to be enhanced by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD. Later, elaborating on this theme, he said that dolphins probably have an oral tradition and culture, meditations, the equivalent of our poetry, mathematics, and a very creative philosophy, all of this passed on from one generation to the next. And if we could understand it, he was saying, think what a boon to humankind that would be.
When I read Dr. Lilly saying that dolphins might be smarter than humans, it touched a responsive chord. I had considered the same thing. In fact I was almost sure of it. Most people who work closely with dolphins have had the eerie feeling that the dolphins were reading their minds. I know how strange that sounds, but I know of no other way to explain their uncanny ability to anticipate my signals—not just once but all the time, as if they not only understood English but were clairvoyant as well.
In a 1962 lecture, Dr. Lilly told how he first realized that dolphins might be speaking English. “The feeling of weirdness,” he called it. “It came on us,” he said, “as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our own language. We felt we were in the presence of Something, or Someone, who was on the other side of a transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn’t even seen.”
Though I had lived around the sea most of my life, I had never thought of dolphins as aliens. But as Dr. Lilly pointed out, they are aliens. At least they are from our viewpoint. Actually, I think Dr. Lilly got it backward. Dolphins are not the aliens—we are. Humans obviously rule the land; in their own way, whales (including dolphins) rule the oceans. But this is an oceanic planet, three to one. Though we tend to think of Earth as made up by land masses, three-fourths of the globe is covered by water. More than 97 percent of all the water on Earth is in the ocean. Glaciers and polar ice have less than 2 percent, and all the rest—the water underground, lakes and rivers and water in the atmosphere, in soil and in living things—makes up less than 1 percent. We call our planet Earth, but a more appropriate name would be Ocean.
Dr. Henry Truby, a communications expert who worked with Dr. Lilly for several years in the Communication Research Institute at Coconut Grove, Florida, said that he and Dr. Lilly originally talked about working with elephants, another animal with a brain larger than that of humans. They switched to dolphins, he said, because they were easier to handle and because Dr. Lilly, a sailor, liked marine life. Dr. Truby, whose specialty was communication, speech, and spectrographic analysis, said that he drew no conclusions from the work they did with dolphins. More work was needed, he said. But at least some of the basic problems of interspecies communication were addressed in the research.
Dr. Lilly was slightly built, a birdlike man (sandpiper) with a tiny voice, the kind you have to strain to hear, and he acted as if he didn’t care if you heard him or not—except it wasn’t an act. Like most controversial people, Dr. Lilly had the ability to attract and repel at the same time. One of his coworkers said with unconcealed envy that people practically threw their money at him—and half the time he insulted them.
If Dr. Lilly did insult people, he probably was unaware of it. Virtually a caricature of the intellectual, he seemed oblivious to others. His true realm was the abstract, or perhaps the alleged connection between theory and the real world. Dr. Lilly’s ideas were orchestrated on a grand scale. Some people loved him for his ideas. They were bold. Imaginative. Daring. Best of all, he dared to be wrong. And he never looked back. Others hated this about him and hated him—especially scientists. Many called him a charlatan. How can you be a scientist, they fumed, and speak in such an oracular style? Most people who worked with dolphins laughed at him. And those who took the trouble to study his work encountered a puzzling contradiction. On the one hand, Dr. Lilly characterized dolphins virtually as superbeings, on the other he was driving spikes into their brains. He called for whales, including dolphins, to be given “complete freedom of the waters of the earth.” Then added, in effect, “But not now, not till we’ve done our research.”
Genius or kook—who knows? Dr. Lilly’s own assessment of himself might be closest to the truth. Like Socrates, Dr. Lilly referred to himself in the third person as a gadfly, stinging his fellow scientists into wakefulness. He liked to say outrageous things, he said, because it made people think.
Dr. Lilly was limited in his experience with dolphins. He rarely got into the water with them. He watched them avidly, though. Hour after hour at the viewing ports of the Miami Seaquarium’s Main Tank, Dr. Lilly leaned on his elbows and studied the dolphins. When the tourists flocked to the Top Deck Show to see the dolphins do their tricks, he stayed below to watch them underwater.
I tried a few times to strike up a conversation with him but couldn’t. Over the years, people we knew in common would introduce us to each other, and it was always as if for the first time. It was strange.
“But we’ve already been introduced,” I said once. We were at the world premiere of Flipper’s New Adventure, and I was determined to put him on the spot.
He looked quizzically at me. “We’ve met. Tonight?”
I smiled indulgently, as if we were both playing his game of Absent-minded Genius. “No, it was right here at the Seaquarium. Two months ago. They called me in to the office to meet you—and we met.”
He pursed his lips thoughtfully and shook his head. “Afraid not. You must be thinking of someone else. I haven’t been here in nearly—” he shrugged to show that it didn’t matter—“oh, a year, at least.”
But of course it had been him. I let it go. I shrugged back at him. “Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“No,” he said deliberately. “It doesn’t matter at all.” Then he turned and joined someone else, and I’m sure he’d already forgotten me.
Later in my career as a dolphin trainer, I read another of his books, Mind of the Dolphin, and was gripped again by the old magic. I wanted to tell him some things that I was sure could help him in his research. I had probably spent more time underwater with dolphins than anyone else, and surely I knew something more about training dolphins and their mental capabilities than most people. That was my job. I did it all the time. And here I was in the same town. You’d think that he would look me up. But he didn’t. So I tried to call him on the phone. In fact, I called him several times at the lab, but not once did I get through to him. I even went by the lab a few times, a dank and dark little place with lots of electronic machinery and a dolphin or two, lonely guinea pigs in a gloomy stench, but he was never there.
The really strange part is that I lived right across the street from him in the Grove, and the closest we ever came to speaking as neighbors was sometimes a brief nod. I continued to read his books, though. I admired him. I didn’t care for his methods all the time, but I thought he was generally right, or at least I thought he was doing what had to be done. I thought I could see what he might have picked up by watching the dolphins—their skins rippling as they swam, for instance. I used to watch them swim myself. Walking past the Main Tank, I always stopped and watched. It was irresistible. I always had the feeling that something beautiful or incredible would happen. The story is told, for example, about a man at another aquarium who used to watch the dolphins underwater from a viewing port. The man was smoking a cigarette when a baby dolphin swam up to the port and gazed out. The man nonchalantly blew a puff of smoke at the baby dolphin. The dolphin swam away to his mother, got a mouthful of milk, and came back to the port, then blew the milk out at the man, making the same white, puffy cloud with the milk that the man had made with the smoke.
The three-ring circus of a Top Deck Show was so fascinating to me that I wandered around almost like a tourist myself. I was always there. I liked working with dolphins so much, I came every day of the week. Jimmy told me, “You’ve got one day off a week, take it. Don’t come around here on your day off.” There were times when he hung his head to the left and showed his teeth in what was not a smile. He did that now. “And don’t,” he said, “go to the front office. Stay away from there.”
But I loved being at the Seaquarium. I would have paid for a ticket if I’d had to. I liked to talk to the spectators, mingle with them. When tourists recognized me (the clam-digger outfit was my uniform), they asked me questions about the fish and the dolphins and I answered them. This was not just part of the job—I enjoyed it. How wonderfully different from anything I’d ever done before! I liked people, and I liked seeing firsthand what people liked and didn’t like.
One day I followed the crowd to the Reef Tank and could feel that my own show, with its provocative suggestions of dolphin intelligence, had made a point. It was a sunny day, with white, puffy cumulus clouds. Whitecaps began breaking over the bay, a light chop. That happens when the wind is at least twelve miles an hour.
From the Reef Tank, I moved with the crowd over to the Shark Channel, where they began asking me about the dolphins.
A family group—the father, mother, three kids—came up to me. They were probably from Iowa. They were all overweight, pink from the sun, playing the role of typical tourists: the camera, the fixed smiles and wild Miami colors. “Excuse me,” the father said, making eye contact. “Real interesting place you got here.” He was not one to rush into rash statements.
“Thank you,” I said. I tried to nod in the same solemn way. Everyone likes to be treated as an individual, even in a huge crowd. At Disney World, the young guides are instructed to treat each question as if it were the first time they’d ever heard it. I tried to do something like that myself, but it wasn’t easy. The questions from the crowds were mostly rather obvious, and after the first few weeks I’d heard them all.
But there’s an urgency each time a question is asked. That makes it different. In this case, the urgency was in the man’s daughter, about five, who pulled at his big hand. He bent down obediently, and she hissed in his ear, “Go ahead. Ask him.”
I smiled.
“Yeah,” the father said, straightening up and shoving his free hand down into his hip pocket. He planted his feet firmly, standing his ground. “We were wondering—you were talking up there about how smart the dolphins are. . .”
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
“How smart are they?”
I’ve heard the same question a thousand times in a thousand variations. “They are really very smart,” I said, nodding with assurance.
He gave a slow, deeply considered nod and turned to his daughter. “You see?” he said. Then he turned back to me, smiling with relief. “Well, we thank you very much.” He smiled and started to say something more. I thought he was going to tell me that if I was ever in Iowa I should drop by and he’d show me around, but he didn’t. He smiled instead, then he and his daughter walked off hand in hand toward the Golden Dome. Suddenly, she pulled free, wheeled and yelled back at me, “Are dolphins as smart as my dog?”
I cocked my head and pretended to give the question serious consideration. Then I yelled back:
“Yes! A lot smarter!”
She said nothing for a moment. “But you don’t even know my dog.”
“Dolphins are smarter than all dogs,” I said simply.
“Oh,” she said with a slow nod.
A Seminole Indian youth had been watching. Wearing dungarees and a colorful Seminole jacket, he advanced on me.
“I’ve got one for you. If dolphins are so smart,” he said, “how could we catch them? And why do they do these silly tricks?”
That question I had heard a thousand times, too. For me, the hard part was to hear it as if for the first time.
“If we’re so intelligent,” I countered, “why do we do things to them?”
His mouth fell open. He had never thought of that. He was with two Seminole girls about his own age, they in their colorful long dresses, their hair like shiny black lacquer, all of them, like me, barefooted. They giggled at him. “Come on,” he told them, taking their arms and tossing me a smile. “White man talk with forked tongue.”
A young blonde woman with Nordic eyes stood in front of me. “I’m next,” she said. “And I hope you’ll treat my question more seriously.”
“I thought I was serious.”
“You know what I mean.” She had dimpled cheeks.
“I’m not so sure of that.” I said. “What’s the question?”
“Same question they asked. But I would like a real answer, if you don’t mind.”
“What was the question again?”
“How intelligent is the dolphin?”
I liked her. Serious, but not deadly serious. In another situation, I thought, she would be wonderfully nonsensical. “You really want to know?”
“Of course. I’m in anthropology. Or at least I’m studying that.” She shot me a smile and cocked her head slightly. “Tell me something I can use, and I might put it in my dissertation. With credit!”
I made a face to show how impressed I was. And I was impressed. I finished high school in the navy and never went beyond that formally except for a few courses at the University of Miami, but I studied all the time, adding to my stockpot of oddball data and learning something from everyone I met. In short, I was self-educated, which means that I could follow my own nose through academia. My education would seem to be unstructured, my path of interest wandering willy-nilly. But there was a structure to it. It was internal discipline. I discovered who I was. And who I wasn’t. I knew that I had gaps, a weakness in certain fundamentals. So I tried to watch what I said very carefully.
I had studied dolphins for some time now. I had caught them in nets, cured them when they got sick, stood by to help when they gave birth, and fed them a million times; I had swum with them in the wild, I had watched them endlessly in the Main Tank, never tiring of it, and had worked with them as trained animals; I was a trained animal as much as they were. The Miami Seaquarium had every book ever written about dolphins, and I had read them all. The Miami Seaquarium was an excellent school for me; it was my alma mater. I used to visit the University of Miami Marine Lab, a large research facility that was practically next door. Everybody there had a Ph.D. I wanted to pick their brains or at least just hang around and absorb things by osmosis. This could be like a graduate school for me, I thought. I wanted to talk to them about Dr. Lilly, for example. I thought the scientists at the marine lab might know him personally. In any event, it would be wonderful, I thought, to meet people interested in discovering the truth about the sea. We had a lot in common, I thought. To me they were like monks, their lives devoted to the most holy of missions. Then I met my first marine biologist in his lab. I introduced myself, we tried to talk, and soon I realized that he could sum up his entire academic experience in two words: the dam-selfish. This is a little fish about two or two and a half inches long. I asked him about dolphins, but he knew nothing about them. He had never heard of Dr. Lilly. And in fact, it seemed to me that he knew nothing about anything that didn’t relate directly to the damselfish. Years later, I discovered that Dr. Arthur A. Myrberg’s interest in the damselfish was like my own interest in dolphins: communication. And after fifteen years of research, he cracked the damselfish code. I wish I had known what he was working on at the time.
I repeated the young woman’s question: “You want some good stuff about dolphin intelligence, huh?”
“Yeah. But it’s got to be real good.” Dimples again. Every time she smiled or frowned or looked puzzled or said something or even thought of saying something, there were those dimples.
“Mind if I ask you a question first?”
“Please do.”
“What do you mean by intelligence?”
She turned away with mock exasperation, then back. “You’ve done it again.”
“Done what?”
“Equivocation.” Her hands went to her hips.
“What do you mean?”
She pressed her lips together and frowned. She had Betty Boop lips that went with the dimples. “Don’t you know anything? It means,” she said, “that you’re playing with words. You’re using ambiguity to conceal the truth. It’s a form of lying.” She laughed. “And don’t deny it.” She blinked her eyes brightly at me. “I was standing right here and heard you answer the same question two ways—and now three ways! You do speak with a forked tongue!”
I stared at her dimples. They seemed to come and go with certain words. I knew what she was talking about—it made sense in a way—and yet it was all wrong. “OK,” I said finally. “Let me try to explain. You think it was the same question, right?”
“It sounded like the same question,” I said. “But it wasn’t. You ask about the dolphin’s intelligence, and you have something very definite in mind. And so does everyone else who asks me about it—but it’s not the same thing at all. Know what the problem is? The problem is the word intelligence. Too many meanings.” My voice was getting brittle. I couldn’t do anything about it. “Don’t bother to give me a dictionary definition. I know what the dictionary says, and it doesn’t help.”
A crowd had gathered around us. About 1,500 people had gone from the Underwater Show to the Reef Tank, but some of them must have thought that this impromptu question-and-answer period was part of the show. The young woman shook her head helplessly, playing to the crowd. There were thirty or forty people there. “It’s not a tricky question,” she said. “It’s really very simple.”
“You think it’s simple,” I said. “But it’s not. By intelligence you probably mean the intelligence of intelligence testing, the good old IQ, or intelligence quotient. Well, forget it. That’s about people.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said softly as if trying to placate a lunatic.
“Then what?” My hands went out, palms up. I told myself that I should give her time to answer. And I did. I waited all of two seconds. “You saw the show, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Could you have done any of that?”
“Could I have held a fish up for the dolphin? I think so.”
“You know what I meant.” I turned to the crowd. “She knows exactly what I meant, but I’ll spell it out for her.” I turned back to her, arms akimbo. “Could you have jumped up for the fish?”
“Like a dolphin?”
“Like the dolphin. Of course.”
“I haven’t really given that any thought.”
“I have,” I said. “You could not have jumped up for the fish. You saw Clown do the cigarette jump, didn’t you?”
She wiped a wisp of blonde hair from her brow with the back of her hand. “How did I get involved in this?” She turned to the crowd and gave a shrug.
“Never mind that,” I said. “You saw the cigarette jump?”
She gave me a long, stony look. She would have walked off if we’d been alone. But in some way, with the crowd watching and all, we had become a part of the act, and we couldn’t just quit. “Yes,” she said. “I saw the cigarette jump. And no. If you’re asking me if I could have done that, no, I could not have done that. So what?”
“So this: You just failed the dolphin IQ test.”
The crowd did not cheer exactly or break into applause or anything like that, but I had the feeling that it was smiling and quietly approving.
She grinned to herself and nodded. “So that’s where you were going with this? I asked you for intelligence, remember? The dolphin can jump better than I can. I don’t deny it. It can swim faster and hold its breath longer than I. I can live with that. It can do lots of things like that better than I can, including jumping up and snipping off a cigarette in your mouth. But I was asking you about intelligence, not skill.”
“And what I’m saying to you is that there is no skill without intelligence.”
“That’s not what I meant—or I don’t think it was.” She held up her hand to stop me from interrupting and went on as if thinking aloud. “Hold on a minute. I said ‘intelligence,’ you gave me ‘skill.’ A dolphin jumping up for a fish is skillful? This is intelligence? Jumping up for a fish?” She was smiling like it was a joke. “Is that what you’re saying? No, don’t stop me. I’ve got something here. You say that there is no skill without intelligence. Take away the intelligence, in other words, and there is no skill. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re saying that skill is a form of intelligence.” She looked at me quizzically. “Is that it?”
“Something like that, yes. What kind of test would you give them? True-false? Multiple-choice?” I smiled benevolently at her. “Or what about jumping? Not just jumping, though, but jumping exactly. Jumping at an exact place and touching an exact spot at an exact moment. And almost never erring. I don’t say that they never make a mistake. If they couldn’t make a mistake, then we would have to say that they couldn’t do it right, either. That’s what the words happen to mean. Machines don’t make mistakes, or at least we don’t think of them that way. Machines do what they have to do, not necessarily what we want them to do or what they were designed to do, but the only thing they can do. If a machine doesn’t do what we think it ought to do, then we figure that it’s got a crossed wire or some other physical malfunction. But not that it’s made a mistake. Not ever.”
I turned to the group that had gathered round us and explained to them, “I have gone into a little detail about machines here because some people, and maybe some of you, really believe deep down that animals are just machines, that they don’t have feelings, they don’t think or anything else like us. But I’m here to tell you that the dolphin, like any other animal, makes mistakes just like humans.
“Let me tell you about it.” I said. “One time Clown jumped up for the cigarette between my lips. I would trust Clown over anyone or anything else in the world. And much more than a person, even the most acrobatic, jumping up off a trampoline, say, with a pair of hedge clippers to snip the cigarette in my mouth. Clown grabbed my face by mistake in her jaws. She got my cheek. I didn’t have time to be scared. It happened too fast. But later, I realized that she had simply miscalculated. She grabbed me by mistake at the top of her leap—and let go without pulling my face off. That’s the only time it ever happened, but it did happen, and it’s dear to me that if she didn’t care, if she didn’t pay attention to the details of the jump, if she couldn’t concentrate on what she was doing, there would be no cigarette jump. And what I’m saying is that if that doesn’t take intelligence, then I don’t know what intelligence is.”
There was a scattering of applause. One old gentleman patted me on the shoulder, nodding approval.
The anthropology student looked puzzled. “Are you saying that the dolphin is more intelligent than I am?”
“It’s possible. He has a much larger brain than you do,” I said, recalling one of Dr. Lilly’s recurring themes. “Brain size is not directly correlated with intelligence. We all know that. But the dolphin has had a large brain like this for at least 180 times as long as we have. Maybe that means something, maybe not. I’m surprised you didn’t say something about language. I expected you to say that dolphins are not as intelligent as we are because they don’t have a language. Well, don’t be too sure of that. I’m suggesting not only that they do have a language but also that they’ve gone way beyond us in terms of communication. Consider this: If we found a race of beings in space 180 times older than we are, wouldn’t we assume that they had something to teach us? Or turn that idea around. If you were arriving on Earth for the first time from some distant galaxy, if you could communicate with any species in any language, if you know only that dolphins had bigger brains for a lot longer time than people did and your mission was to contact the most advanced form of life on Earth, who would you contact?”
Nobody said anything for a moment, then the dimpled girl with the cool-gray eyes said, “I know who I wouldn’t contact.” She turned on her heel and flounced off, the crowd giving way.
I couldn’t resist. “Who?” I yelled.
“You!”