(1) Man has not yet been willing to investigate the possibility of another intelligent species. (2) Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are assumed to be “dumb beasts” with little or no evidence for this presumption. (3) We do not yet know very much about these animals—their necessities, their intelligences, their lives, the possibility of their communications. (4) It is possible for man to investigate these matters objectively with courage and perseverance. (5) To properly evaluate whales, dolphins, porpoises, we must use everything we have intellectually, all available knowledge, humanistic as well as scientific.
Our best knowledge of ourselves as a species, as humans, is in the humanities and in the budding, growing sciences of man. In pursuit of understanding of the whales, dolphins, and porpoises, we need, at least at the beginning, a large view which is in the human sciences and in the humanities. The sciences of animals are necessarily restrictive in their view, and hence not yet applicable to our problems.
The history of the animal sciences shows that they have had grave difficulties with the fact that the observers are present and human. These sciences, like physics, chemistry, and biology, play the game as if the human observer were not there and the systems were isolated from man. This is fine strategy for “man-less nature” studies and quite appropriate for such studies.
However, I submit to you another view, for a science of man and animal, their relationships to one another. Modern man and modern dolphin and whale may be best investigated in the framework of a new science one might call “anthropo-zoology” or “zoo-anthropology.” This science is a deep study of man, of the animal, of their mutual relations, present and potential. In this discipline scientists encourage close relations with the animal, and study the developing relation between man and so-called “beast.”
For the last three years in the Communication Research Institute[23] we have been pursuing an investigative path in this new science with the pair “man and bottlenose dolphin.” We have encouraged and pursued studies in classical sciences such as neurophysiology, animal psychology, anatomy, biophysics, and zoology. We have also initiated and pursued this new science of the man and dolphin relation; these “homo-delphic” studies, if you will, are triply demanding: we must not only know our animal objectively but we must know man objectively, and ourselves subjectively. We cannot fight shy of involving ourselves in the investigation as objects also. In this science man, and hence one’s own self, are part of the system under investigation. This is not an easy discipline. One must guard quite as rigorously (or even more so) against the pitfalls of wishful thinking and sensational fantasy as in other scientific endeavors. This field requires a self-candor, an inner honesty, and a humility quite difficult to acquire. But I maintain that good science can be done here, that the field is a proper one for properly trained and properly motivated investigators.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
[1]Plinius Secundus. Natural History. III, Book IX.
[2]Aristotle. Historia Animalium. Books I-IX.
[3]Donaldson, Henry H. The Growth of the Brain. London: Walter Scott, 1895.
[4]Smith, G. Elliot, in Royal College of Surgeons of England, Museum, Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Physiological Series of Comparative Anatomy. London: Taylor and Francis, 1902, pp. 349, 351, 356.