The Dolphin in the Mirror Read Online Free PDF Page B

I kept for only the most important moments in my life.
    Public awareness of the precarious plight of many species of whale was growing at the time, and the efforts of the International Whaling Commission were much in the news. Roger Payne and Scott McVay had published a landmark paper in
Science
magazine in 1971 reporting that humpback whales sang songs with very complex structures, similar to classical music pieces, with units, phrases, and themes. They released an album of the humpbacks' eerily moving songs to tremendous interest and acclaim. The beauty of their songs touched me, but I was far from the science of it all. Philadelphia had an aquarium called Aquarama, which had several dolphins on display. I had never visited it growing up and had had no desire to go there. I had no interest in watching dolphins jump through hoops.
    I had never been a fan of the
Flipper
television series, which had had a tremendous following in the mid- to late 1960s. The Flipper character was a bottlenose dolphin (played by five female dolphins, and the occasional male for a particular trick) who, the story line went, lived with Porter Ricks, a warden in the fictional Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve in the Florida Keys. Week after week, Flipper helped Ricks protect the park and its wildlife and aided in tracking down and capturing various miscreants who were up to no good there. I disliked the program, thought it was stupid. I preferred
Lassie.
    And yet, when I read the
Times
article that rainy Sunday afternoon, my attention was immediately arrested. As I said, it was as if I had been primed for that moment, but in a way that was not at all obvious to me then and still isn't now. I instantly became ravenous for anything and everything that had been written about dolphins. I scoured the scientific literature and found many papers on dolphin brain anatomy and communication, and I consumed John Lilly's popular-press books on his observations and speculations,
The Mind of the Dolphin,
Man and Dolphin,
and others.
    Lilly was an American neuroscientist, philosopher, inventor, and writer, a man who delighted in being seen as both a pioneering scientist and a maverick. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a member of the California counterculture of scientists, mystics, and thinkers, an occasional acquaintance of the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and aware of the psychopharmaceuticals that implied. He was a larger-than-life character, and his research on dolphin minds was driven by a desire to understand consciousness, an ambitious quest that has occupied scientists and philosophers for millennia. His unorthodox approach, and his conviction that the dolphin mind was in some ways quasi-human—that we were destined to communicate and understand each other—elevated dolphins to almost mythical status in the eyes of his followers. There were many of them.
    ***
    In addition to doing pioneering scientific work, Lilly single-handedly created a new mythology of dolphins that went far beyond science. In 1975 Lilly put together a compilation of his earlier books and papers in a volume entitled
Lilly on Dolphins—Humans of the Sea.
The concept of humans of the sea may seem a stretch and perhaps anthropomorphic in the extreme, but it was certainly not the first time this idea was put forth. The phrase
humans of the sea
had been bestowed on dolphins by the Maori in New Zealand; John Lilly was merely the latest in a long line of dolphin mythologizers.
    Humans and dolphins could hardly be more different in our physical forms and in the worlds we inhabit. And as mammals, our two species could hardly be more distant from each other, being separated by a gulf of ninety-five million years of evolutionary time. We humans are bipedal primates equipped with dexterous hands and guided through a terrestrial environment principally by an adequate, though not superior, visual ability. Dolphins have the hydrodynamic form of fish (no arms, no legs), and they