Part 10

Summarized from McCarthy, Dorothea, “Language Development in Children,” in Carmichael, Leonard, ed., Manual of Child Psychology. New York: John Wiley, 1946, pp. 476-581.

Table 1 shows relations between age, brain weight, and speech performance, up to 23 months, 1070 grams, and the use of full sentences. By 17 years, the brain reaches and levels off at 1450 grams and the number of words, levels of abstraction, etc., are so large as to be difficult to assess.

In these processes, what are the minimum necessary but not necessarily sufficient factors? On the biological side, modern theory concentrates on two factors: total numbers of neurons and the number of interconnections between them. On the psychological side, modern theory concentrates on the numbers of occurrences of reinforced contingencies experienced, the number of repetitions, and the number of adequate presentations from the accepted set of the consensus known as “native language,” and the total numbers of sets in the stored memories at a given age. In addition, of course, is the adequate development of the transmitting and of the receiving equipment needed for speech and its ancillary behaviors.

On the biological side, modern neurology says the number of neurons in the human brain reaches maximum value before birth at about 13 billions. After this point, the increase in weight consists of increased numbers of fibers, increased connections, increased size of elements, and increased efficiency and selectivity of transmission. Thus the increase in weight of the human brain from about 400 to 1400 grams seems to be devoted to improving its internal (as well as external) communication, storage, and computation networks. As I have stated elsewhere (Man and Dolphin), it is my impression that there exist critical threshold values in the brain’s growth pattern at which certain kinds of performance become possible. Complex speech acquisition seems related to brain weights of 800 to 1000 grams, but no smaller. This assumes, of course, numbers of neurons (10¹⁰) and numbers of connections and opportunities for learning and time to learn commonly found with humans.

The critical psychological factors in speech acquisition are slowly being dug out and described. Among these the most important seem to be a continuous background of presentations to the child in rewarding circumstances of speech and its close relations to objects, actions, satisfaction of needs, and persons. Imitation of one’s use of facial and vocal apparatus appears spontaneously in the happy child. The virtuosity of the child as a mimic is truly astonishing.

I am also impressed by evidence for what I call the “transactional drive.” A bright child seems to seek and respond best to those persons who respond in kind, back and forth in exchanges of sounds and linked actions. For example, if one starts such a transaction with a child of 22 months with a loud word, if he is ready, he may return his version of the word or a slight variant; if one replies with another variant the child replies with still a third, or even suddenly with a new word, and so on back and forth in a transactional vocal dance. Or one may reply to a child who invites such an exchange to begin. Such exchanges seem to function as rewards of themselves, and hence the name, “transactional drive.” This phenomenon is more than mere mechanical slavish mimicry. It seems to aid in perfecting pronunciation, increases vocabulary, increases the bonds with other persons, serves to substitute the “consensus-dictionary” words for the private baby words, and is thus essential to learning a language of one’s own species. It is thus that the child “becomes human.”

As the child ages and grows, the exchanges lengthen, and the time during which each member of the dyad is quiet while the other speaks becomes longer, until finally for a half hour or so, I am lecturing and you are at least quiet, if not listening.

How does all of this relate to modern dolphins, porpoises, and whales? From the vast array of scientific facts and theories about our own species, a few of those which I feel are useful in approaching another species to evaluate its intelligence are discussed above. But before I make connections there, let us attenuate some interfering attitudes and points of view, some myths not so modern; these interfering presumptions can be stated as follows:

(1) No animal has a language comparable to a human language. (2) No animal is as intelligent as man. (3) Man can adapt himself to any environment quite as well as any animal. (4) Intelligence and intellect can be expressed only in the ways man expresses or has expressed them. (5) All animal behavior is instinct-determined. (6) None of man’s thought and behavior is so determined. (7) Only man thinks and plans; animals are incapable of having a mental life. (8) Philosophy and contemplative and analytic thought are characteristic only of man, not of any animal.

All of these statements stem from ignorance and anthropocentricity. For example, who are we to say that whales, dolphins, and porpoises are to be included as “dumb beasts”? It would be far more objective and humble to tell the truth—we don’t know about these animals because we haven’t “been there yet.” We have not lived in the sea, naked and alone, or even in mobile groups, without steel containers to keep out the sea itself. For purposes of discussion let us make the following assumptions which push counter to the current of bias running deep among us:

(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 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

Plinius Secundus. Natural History. III, Book IX.

Aristotle. Historia Animalium. Books I-IX.

Donaldson, Henry H. The Growth of the Brain. London: Walter Scott, 1895.

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.

Scammon, Charles Melville. The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America, Described and Illustrated: Together with an Account of the American Whale-Fishery. San Francisco: J. H. Carmany, 1874, p. 78.

von Bonin, Gerhardt. “Brain-Weight and Body-Weight in Mammals,” Journal of General Psychology, XVI (1937), 379-389.

Lilly, John C. Man and Dolphin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961; London: Victor Gollancz, 1962.

McBride, Arthur F., and Hebb, D.O. “Behavior of the Captive Bottle-Nose Dolphin, Tursiops truncatus,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, XLI (1948), 111-123.

Griffin, Donald R. Echoes of Bats and Men. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.

Kellogg, Winthrop N. Porpoises and Sonar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Lilly, John C., and Miller, Alice M. “Vocal Exchanges between Dolphins; Bottlenose Dolphins ‘Talk’ to Each Other with Whistles, Clicks, and a Variety of Other Noises,” Science, CXXXIV (1961), 1873-1876.

Schevill, William E., and Lawrence, Barbara. “Auditory Response of a Bottlenosed Porpoise, Tursiops truncatus, to Frequencies above 100 KC,” Journal of Experimental Zoology, CXXIV (1953), 147-165.