Don’t Have Sex With Your Dolphin, Even if He Asks

…and no drugs, please

Dogs can’t talk

In Hallucinating Your Inner Trans-Reptile, I talked about how brains can trick us when they try to create a coherent reality out of random sensory information. One of those tricks is ‘hearing’ voices in ambiguous sounds. If you’ve ever watched those ‘talking’ dog videos on YouTube, you know what I mean.

Of course, there’s no harm in thinking that your dog can talk. It’s kind of fun. But, when scientists hear voices, it can get a little weird… and change a lot of people’s lives… forever.

Dolphins can’t talk either

Take John Lilly, for example. He was a brilliant neuroscientist, physician, psychoanalyst, writer, and inventor. But, like many brilliant people, he had an ‘eccentric’ side, too. He was a true psychonaut — a self-described “consciousness pioneer” — an avid connoisseur of psychedelic drugs, and an influential member of the scientific ‘counterculture generation’ along with the likes of Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.

Lilly also had a lifelong fascination with brains. In his early career, he was head of the Section of Cortical Integration at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where he studied the neurophysiology (electrical brain activity) of animals. Although crude by today’s standards, Lilly had invented techniques to stimulate and record the spontaneous electrical activity going on in specific parts of an animal’s brain, and then correlate that activity with its behavior in real-time.

Although he studied a lot of animals, Lilly was particularly fascinated by dolphins (sometimes referred to as porpoises). The sheer size of their brain, their apparent intelligence, and their complex vocalizations led him to believe that these animals were potentially as smart as people, and that their vocalizations were actually a complex language — “Dolphinese,” he called it — perhaps as nuanced as English. In fact, Lilly became so intrigued by these ideas that he left his job at NIMH and set up a dolphin Communication Research Institute in Coconut Grove, Florida.

During one of his experiments, John’s wife, Mary walked into the operating theater and heard something unusual coming from one of the experimental dolphins. In her own words:

“I came in, I heard John talking [to colleagues in another room] and the porpoise would go “Awaw-awaw-awa” like John. And then I realized it was hearing their voices and imitating them. And I went down to where they were operating and told them that this was going on and they were quite startled.”

(Listen to Mary, here, 29 secs.)

Mary was convinced that she’d heard ‘human’ speech patterns in the dolphin’s vocalizations – just like those YouTubers hear in their dogs’ voices — and John became convinced that he heard them, too.

However, John ‘heard’ more than human-like speech in the dolphins’ squeaks and squawks. He thought they were actually trying to talk to him in their own natural language, Dolphinese.

So, anxious to get the conversation started, Lilly began experimenting to see if he could teach dolphins to mimic human language well enough to speak English. (He figured that would be easier than people trying to learn Dolphinese.) His experimental results were published in a few scientific journals, and in a best-selling book, Man and Dolphin… which he confided to colleagues he’d written in one weekend while high on amphetamines.

Despite the fact that Lilly’s dolphins were no better at human-like vocalizations than the dogs on YouTube, he remained optimistic. Encouraged by his earlier, groundbreaking experiments in brain electrophysiology, and against the backdrop of a burgeoning national space program, Lilly predicted that “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.”

Lilly was so sure that we’d soon be chatting with dolphins — if we could just get them to speak English — that he envisioned creating a Cetacean Chair at the United Nations so that whales, dolphins, porpoises, and humans could get together and discuss philosophy, politics, world affairs, and the nature of existence.

Space aliens were next

Lilly’s ideas — and his unbridled enthusiasm — intrigued a group of very influential, government funded astronomers including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, both of whom were actively searching for, and trying to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations as part of the international SETI program.

Drake and his colleagues thought that Lilly’s work on interspecies dolphin communication would help them understand the communication challenges they’d face when they eventually contacted extraterrestrial civilizations… or the extraterrestrials contacted them.

The intriguing possibility of communicating with dolphins and extraterrestrials, in conjunction with a well-funded, national space program allowed Lilly to secure research grants from NASA, the US Navy (they wanted to decode “Dolphinese”), and a few other government agencies. That money funded his research in a new, modern dolphin laboratory he had built in the US Virgin Islands.

In return for their support, Lilly promised his investors a scientific breakthrough of “cosmic proportions” that will “transcend the differences of evolutionary adaptation and [allow us to] converse with another species the way we converse with each other.” That was a tall order, indeed.

Along comes Margaret

Margaret Howe, a 22-year-old former college student living on St. Thomas, heard rumors about a strange house at the end of the island that kept dolphins. Her curiosity piqued, she made her way down to Lilly’s lab and volunteered to help however she could. 

Margaret had no scientific training but loved animals and was naturally empathetic. So, she was quick to bond with the dolphins, and enthusiastically embraced Lilly's vision of teaching them to speak English.

After some preliminary experiments, Margaret conjured up a fantastic plan with which Lilly enthusiastically agreed. The rooms in the upper floor of the laboratory — including a balcony that overhung an enclosed dolphin pool — were sealed, and flooded with a couple feet of water. A makeshift desk, bed, and small dry area were set up for Margaret. Her plan was to live in this semi-aquatic environment, 24 hours a day for 10 weeks, with a rambunctious, six-year-old dolphin named Peter. Her goal was to teach Peter to speak and understand English. Lilly’s explicit instructions were that Peter should “…learn to physically say the [English] words, and… learn the meaning of what he is saying.” 

So, every day, Peter was loaded onto a sling attached to pulleys and hoisted up from the dolphin pool to the partially flooded laboratory for training. During the lessons, Margaret would laboriously encourage Peter to mimic what she said — as a parent might with a child — or repeat the name of some object that she held up. In return for making some sound, Peter was rewarded with food or, sometimes, a toy.

Although Lilly had agreed not to directly interfere with Margaret’s work, he often spent time in a sensory deprivation tank (which he had invented) trying to communicate encouragement to Margaret and Peter telepathically. It didn’t help.

Despite Margaret’s dedication, Peter never did learn English. The best he could do was squawk back a few sounds that roughly approximated the cadence of Margaret’s speech. On the other hand, Margaret learned to mimic Peter perfectly.

(Listen to Margaret teaching Peter, here, 45 sec.)

(Listen to Margaret imitating Peter, here, 34 sec.)

The big delusion

The most fantastic aspect of this experiment wasn’t that Margaret was trying to teach Peter to speak English. After all, she was following Lilly’s direction, and other scientists — much more well educated than Margaret— have been seduced by the improbable idea that they could have meaningful conversations with animals (like apes or birds).

To my mind, the most fantastic aspect was that both Lilly and Margaret succumbed to the delusion that Peter would eventually understand what Margaret was saying, and be able to respond to the meanings of her words. That misperception is most evident in the way that Margaret talked to Peter.

For instance, during training sessions, when Peter would make his natural whistles and clicks, Margaret would admonish, “Come right out with the English, Peter! …don’t even think in your own language… English all the time!” And in loud, deliberate tones she’d say, “SPEAK – ENGLISH – ONLY – PETER” as if her words spoken slowly would be understood by a dolphin… the same way that English speakers try to make themselves understood by talking loudly and slowly to non-English speakers.

However, nothing seemed to work. 

One of the ways that dolphins make sounds is by pushing pressurized air through a complex nasal system, past two pairs of skin flaps called phonic lips, and then out the blowhole (a modified nostril) on top of their head. As air rushes through the nasal passages, the surrounding tissues — including the internal phonic lips — vibrate, producing sound. However, we still don’t know the degree to which dolphins can control their phonic lips, or how well they can hear when their head is out of water.

Nonetheless, in an attempt to encourage Peter to ‘speak’ more clearly, Margaret encircled her mouth with a wide ring of white makeup and blackened her lips. She thought that Peter would somehow recognize the dark circle of her mouth as a blowhole, see her lips as analogous to his phonic lips, and then try to mimic her lip movements. Of course, Peter had never seen his blowhole (because it’s on top of his head), or his phonic lips, for that matter. So, there was no way he could make the connection. Besides that, phonic lips don’t work like human lips. The whole idea didn’t make any sense at all.

All her efforts notwithstanding, Peter never learned anything beyond a bit of crude mimicry. Despite this, when interviewed fifty years after the failed experiment, Margaret remained convinced that Peter would have learned English if the training had continued long enough. Even after half a century of reflection, Margaret believed that Peter’s progress during their 10 weeks together surpassed what any human infant would’ve accomplished in the same amount of time (References below).

Margaret got lost in the fantasy

One of the most important lessons to be learned from the dolphin communication experiment is the degree to which misunderstanding biology can fuel an ever-tightening spiral of self-deception. Of course, Lilly and Margaret were not the first to succumb, and they won’t be the last… but their fantasies went farther than most.

When Margaret started her experiment, Peter was a normal, rambunctious, sexually maturing adolescent. At some level, Margaret knew that. In her words: “When we had nothing to do was when we did the most,” she remembered. “He was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it.” As Peter became more sexually active, however, his behavior escalated, and their teaching sessions became more frequently interrupted by Peter’s insistent sexual overtures. “I find that his desires are hindering our relationship,” she wrote in her journal. “I play with him just so long now and then he gets an erection and the lesson is broken.”

Margaret found that loading Peter back onto the makeshift elevator, and lowering him into the dolphin pool to consort with the female dolphins when he became amorous was too disruptive to his training. So, she figured it’d be easier just to satisfy him manually... which she regularly did. “This may strengthen the bond between the dolphin and the human,” she wrote. It worked. In her words, “….Peter has modified his sexual rambunctious… to a more humanized level… and no longer has to come to a dead stop when he gets excited.”

Margaret never hid these trysts from anyone, including Lilly. She was completely comfortable with the intimacy, in her words, “…putting as much love into the tone, touch, and mood as possible.” Unfortunately, Margaret was oblivious to how their interspecies relationship would be viewed when it finally became public.

There have been several accounts written about Margaret’s intimate relationship with Peter, most sensationalistic and unnecessarily unkind. That’s not my intent. I only want to point out how misunderstandings about the biological world and our place in it can lead even intelligent, well-meaning people into fantastically delusional beliefs.

Lilly got lost, too

As I’m sure you know, NASA never did find any extraterrestrials with whom to communicate. So, learning how to talk to dolphins lost its allure. Eventually, the critics of dolphin communication research outnumbered its supporters, and federal funding dried up.

So, in a last-ditch effort to make his dolphins more communicative and, perhaps, to finally establish communication with them, Lilly began giving them LSD to ‘expand’ their consciousness.

At the time, Lilly was licensed to use LSD for research — and he took a lot of it, himself. Although the drug had little effect on the dolphins, giving

 it to the animals became a major point of contention between Lilly and his staff, especially Margaret. She definitely did not want Peter given the drug. However, Lilly did anyway.

The LSD experiments were the last straw for Gregory Bateson the famous anthropologist/animal behaviorist in charge of caring for Lilly’s dolphins. He resigned in protest.

Without a supportive staff, and with no more funding, Lilly had to close the lab after nearly a decade of research.

So, should we “follow the science”?

Well, I think we should… if we actually understand how science works.

First and foremost, science is a human endeavor. It’s created, performed, shaped, and influenced by people with all of their strengths and foibles. Without a doubt, it’s far superior to, and more effective than other ways of learning about the world but, in the end, it’s an organic – sometimes unpredictable, but always self-correcting — process. We should “follow the science,” but we should neither do it blindly, nor stop thinking critically.

As with all human endeavors, the process of scientific discovery can have occasional glitches that can lead to ubiquitous and intractable misunderstandings: For instance, we now know that dopamine is not the “pleasure molecule,” melatonin does not ‘control’ sleep, animals are not ‘perfectly’ adapted to the environment, the earth’s continents are not in fixed positions, cold fusion was a mistake, it’s unclear whether surgical masks effectively prevent viral spread, stress does not cause ulcers, you can’t surgically change someone's sex or turn them into anything you want with rewards and punishments… and you can’t have meaningful conversations with animals. Over time, science corrected — or will correct — these misconceptions, albeit sometimes slowly.

Epilogue

All human stories are unexpectedly complex, and there are no unambiguous heroes or villains. In fact, Lilly went on to become a staunch activist against the capture and experimental use of dolphins, and was influential in the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Nonetheless, when smart — even brilliant – people mistake their fantasies for biological reality, it should give us pause. How many times have we erred?

As I said, some fantasies are rather innocent. It really doesn’t matter if you think your dog can talk. After all, Prof. Irene Pepperberg spent 30 years teaching her parrot Alex to talk, and now she’s advising the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence folks. (I wonder if they’ll ever make contact.)

On the other hand, there are some biological fantasies that have dire consequences... especially when people expect us to affirm and accept their fantasies as our reality. That’s never a good thing.

Excuse me, now. I want to go watch some dog videos on YouTube.

* * *

References

Two documentaries about Lilly’s research are here, and here.

A lesser-known, and more disturbing video by Ted Nelson — a researcher in Lilly’s lab who also had an intimate encounter with a dolphin — is here. Nelson was the information technology pioneer and philosopher/sociologist who coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia.”

Lilly’s 1961 book, Man and Dolphin can be found here

All other references are embedded in the text.