The Dolphin in the Mirror (35 page)

We journey onward into the thirteenth-century world of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who accepted the Aristotelian scale of being, yet, foreshadowing Darwin, also envisioned a degree of continuity between humans and other animals. Although he saw man as alone and superior to animals in having an intellective soul, he saw the powers of man as not so very different from those of other animals, only more "heightened." Aquinas's dualistic view of men and animals, all of whom combined physical bodies with ethereal souls, had a major impact on the writings of René Descartes in the seventeenth century, who denied such dualism for other animals. He stripped the soul from nonhuman animals and left it in the sole possession of us. Only humans had a thinking substance—a ghost in the machine. All other animals were automatons merely sleepwalking through life, aware of nothing, thinking nothing. This view dominated until the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin and Georges Romanes enthusiastically embraced the belief that nonhuman animals were indeed capable of both rational thought and emotional life, even if not as lofty as our own. Yet this aspect of Darwin's thinking was harshly dismissed by the school of behaviorism beginning in the 1920s, which effectively catapulted nonhuman animals back to Aristotle's exile from the club of rationality. At best, the question of animals' minds was considered beyond the pale of science because, behaviorists said, thoughts and feelings in animals were private phenomena and therefore inaccessible to objective measurement, so it was foolish to waste time trying to access them.

The cognitive revolution of recent decades, pioneered largely by Donald Griffin, has brought forward a new perspective on animal minds, one with which Darwin and Romanes would have been comfortable. We now recognize that
Homo sapiens
("wise man" or "knowing man" or "thinking man") shares the world with other creatures that think too. By the end of the course, my students come to see that the initial question,
Do
animals think?, is the wrong question. It should be,
How
do animals think? Animals are capable of far greater richness of behaviors than was once imagined; they were simply
assumed
to be incapable of thinking, to lack minds of a kind that resembled ours in
any way.
If you live with a dog or a cat or if you ride horses, you may be quick to say, "I already knew they could think!" But the path that I trace with my students requires rigorous science rather than affectionate anecdotes. And at the end of my course, I leave science behind and turn to poetry.

Two fine thinkers have had important influences on my work, and I feel a visceral resonance with their ideas. One is the British anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson, whose phrase
pattern which connects
speaks eloquently of our connectedness with nature and other species. The second is Loren Eiseley, American anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer, whose prose matches or even exceeds the luminosity of his thoughts. It is to Eiseley that I turn in the final class of the course, first with his poem "Magic."
¹
Eiseley received thirty-six honorary degrees during his varied career, making him the most honored member of the University of Pennsylvania since Benjamin Franklin. He was devoted to bringing science to life for the general public.

In "Magic," Eiseley described how he became enchanted by a particularly vibrant male red cardinal, one that liked "practicing vocal magic" as he flew back and forth by the windows of Eiseley's house. Eiseley described the morning ritual of opening the kitchen window, placing seed on the sill, closing the window, and waiting for that red male, along with his family, to come to feed. Tentatively at first, the birds soon came to demand the morning offering, expressing impatience if Eiseley was late or forgot, which he rarely did. Eiseley felt affection for the entire family, but it was that first red bird that found its way into his soul as the two individuals—bird and human—forged a special relationship. He thought of the bird as a "sorcerer," and he was its "apprentice." This was not the role of the brash young sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's poem, written in 1797, who, tired of the mundane chore of cleaning his master's workshop, tried to enlist his yet-to-be-tamed magical powers, to disastrous effect. Instead, in Eiseley's eyes, being a sorcerer's apprentice meant he was in a position to learn some of the magic the sorcerer wielded. Alas, before many weeks passed, the sorcerer apparently met with an accident, and its nest was thereafter deserted.

Two lines in the poem have special meaning for me, as they speak to my own experience:

I love forms beyond my own
and regret the borders between us.

I, too, have developed rituals of the sort Eiseley describes in "Magic," feeding the cardinals and imperious blue jays in my garden in Connecticut. But it is the antics of the crows that draw me. If I hadn't found my way to studying dolphins, I think I would now be working with crows. "I love forms beyond my own": Ever since I was a young girl I've felt an extraordinarily urgent, and to me entirely natural, connection with animals. My pets, and the waifs and strays that I was constantly rescuing, elicited compassion in me as instinctive as the urge to climb trees and other tomboyish antics of childhood. And I really felt I could communicate with my dog and with other creatures, as if I could wield the magic of King Solomon's ring. Show me a kid who, given the right environment, doesn't feel that way, who doesn't know in her being that she and the creatures of the world of nature are one. It is, in the purest and most innocent sense, the experience of a strong connection, a pattern that connects and a deep sense of caring—I can only describe it as unconditional love. Too bad that as we grow older and become immersed in the trappings of civilization, most of us are oblivious to its gradual disappearance.

The German-born American social scientist and philosopher Erich Fromm coined a word for this powerful connection with nature:
biophilia,
a love of life and living systems. In a book with that single word as its title, the evolutionary biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson argued that biophilia is encoded in our genes, the product of evolutionary interdependence in our Paleolithic ancestors. "[W]e are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms," he wrote. "They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit."
²

For many of us in technologically advanced societies, including many environmentalists, the reductionist ethos of science that breaks nature into its component parts and doesn't see the whole, coupled with our innate natural bias sometimes called speciesism, leads us to view nonhuman creatures as inferior to
Homo sapiens,
beings to be judged by their economic usefulness to us, with no intrinsic value of their own. The reality of interdependence among all of Earth's organisms has little place among the essentially mechanistic mainstream thinking of today.

For most of us, then, biophilia, part of the fabric of what it is to be human, is glimpsed only occasionally, when you stop in your tracks to gaze at a glorious natural panorama, or when you take time to walk in the woods, looking, listening, smelling nature. Or when you gaze into your pet's eyes and recognize a returned gaze. I feel extraordinarily privileged to have been able to enter the world of dolphins so intimately over the years, in my work with them in aquariums, during rescues, and in their natural habitat, which reinforces my sense of a unity in biology through the patterns that connect that I see every day. It keeps me connected to that kid in me. And in this I resonate with another line in Eiseley's "Magic":

How does a man say to his fellows
he has been enchanted
by a bird?

And how does a woman say to her colleagues, and to the world, that she has been enchanted by a dolphin? Just as Eiseley allowed himself to be taught the magic of his little avian sorcerer, not only have I been enchanted by Circe and her successors, I have been taught by them, taught to see their world through different eyes. In his book
King Solomon's Ring,
Konrad Lorenz spoke of the supposed magic of the seal ring as a metaphor for enhanced powers of observation of animals' behaviors and modes of communication. Those of us who study animal communication are effectively in search of King Solomon's ring, in search of keener ways of observing and understanding them. That is what Circe and her successors have taught me.

***

Consider the stories of dolphins supporting injured or aging fellow dolphins, preventing them from sinking and drowning, or approaching sailors and others in trouble at sea, warding off sharks or guiding distressed people to shore and to safety. If these acts were carried out by people toward other people, or toward animals in need of help, we would describe them as showing empathy and compassion, an expression of felt care for another individual. The question is, when dolphins behave in these ways, do these actions also come from empathy, compassion, and care? In other words, do they know what they are doing, or are they mindlessly following a primal drive?

These are difficult questions; it is hard to know what is in the mind of an individual with whom you are not able to converse. But as Circe showed with Delphi, not every mother has an unerring instinct or understanding to push her poor flailing calf to the surface. And Circe wasn't the only mother I saw who apparently had no push-the-flailing-baby-to-the-surface instinct. There are enough such observations that I believe the primal-drive argument fails. Which leaves us with a different question: How do dolphins think under these circumstances? We have ventured along this path before, of course. But here I want to use the question to explore some of the resistance to the idea of animal thinking.

In 1960 Eiseley wrote a beautiful essay called "The Long Loneliness,"
³
which begins "There is nothing more alone in the universe than man." Our supposed "loneliness" was the result of the widespread belief of the time that only humans possessed rational, thinking minds and high-caliber intelligence. This left our species alone on an intellectual pinnacle, unable to communicate our thoughts and feelings to any other creature despite a strong desire to do so. "When we were children," he wrote, "we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible." (Some of us kids, of course, believed we could!) "Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood; the rabbit was left on the lawn, the dog was relegated to his kennel."
⁴

Eiseley's inspiration for the essay had been John Lilly's work on dolphins and his ideas about their large, complex brains and inferred high intelligence, which offered a possible pathway to ending the long loneliness. Eiseley argued that perhaps we hadn't recognized other intelligent minds here on Earth because we had been using a human model of intelligence—symbolic language, hands capable of making tools, and so on. What if we imagined an intelligence such as ours in a creature that had exchanged hands for fins and lived in the ocean? What would the evidence of intelligence look like in the absence of the products of science and technology, in the absence of material manifestations of our minds?

I read the essay in my early days as a graduate student, and it was very influential in my thinking. Yet I have never experienced the kind of loneliness to which Eiseley refers. I have always felt an abundance of life and intelligence around me in nature. But he asks the key question: What kind of experiments do you do if you don't know what you are looking for? Donald Griffin's discovery that bats navigate using echolocation is a good lesson. At the time, no one had even considered that animals might use a form of radar to find their way in the world, and so no one had actively looked for it. Griffin stumbled on it by chance and was greeted with disbelief when he reported what he had found.

When we try to interpret animal minds, animal thinking, and animal behavior, it is all too easy to use our own experience as a model. This act of anthropomorphism, of assigning human qualities to animals, can be a helpful start to understanding what is going on in the mind of an animal, but it is also dangerously seductive. As a scientist I must find a balance between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, in which we assume that we humans alone are unique in our abilities and that our kind of intelligence is the only "real" intelligence. In the writings of animal behaviorists and animal intelligence researchers over the past eight decades or so, there are many stern warnings about the pitfalls of anthropomorphism. But there was little, if anything, about the dangers of anthropocentrism until the beginning of the cognitive revolution, precisely because it governed a great deal of mainstream thinking. Anthropocentrism remained an unspoken assumption of reality: that
Homo sapiens
were so different from other animals, so special, that no useful parallels between ourselves and any other species could be drawn.

One of my favorite snippets from history on this topic concerns the wife of the bishop of Worcester. In 1860, following a debate at Oxford between Thomas Huxley and the good bishop on the matter of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the bishop's wife purportedly said, "My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known." The notion of any connection between exalted humanity and the base world of animals was, and is, abhorrent to many people, then and now.

Evolutionary continuity of physical form between humans and anthropoid ancestors, and by extension the living great apes, has long been an accepted fact. Yet even in physical forms, anthropocentrism lingers on. The evolutionary tree of life is envisaged by some as a conical pine, with humans at the very top of the tree—the pinnacle. This is not so unlike Aristotle's placement of humans, alone, at the top of the Ladder of Life—alone. The reality, as all evolutionary scientists know, is that the tree of life is more like a gracious elm, broad and lush, with
Homo sapiens
one branch among many others, each of which has its own collection of ingenious adaptations. Man is no longer seen as the pinnacle of evolution but rather as one outcome of a diverse process of adaptation.