Dolphins, Myths & Transformation – by Ryan DeMares

DeMares is the first person to hold a doctorate in interspecies communication. Her emphasis is on transpersonal consciousness, the human-nonhuman animal bond, and bio-ethics.

Much of DeMares’ research focuses on the mammals with the highest intelligence, including primates and cetaceans. Surprisingly, there are more animals than we think that have rudimentary language. For instance, prairie dogs have extensive vocabularies for danger intrudors, with different words for human, antelope, coyote, snake and so on, with even distinguishing words for color and shape of the intruders.

But in this book, she focuses mostly on dolphins. There are many other dolphin researchers that she introduces, including the infamous John Lilly, who is probably more known to us from his 1960ies subculture of drugs and particularly LSD, than from his groundbreaking dolphin research. Both Lilly and DeMares believe that dolphins are at least as intelligent as humans, perhaps even more. They believe they have a complicated language, oral history, ethics and highly developed social order.

The book also talks about the more foo-foo stuff, like dolphins as healers, dolphin consciousness and how it affects humans, the euphoria and well-being that humans achieve from swimming with dolphins, dolphin dreams, and the like. I went quickly through those pages, but I ate up the science stuff.

The complexity of the dolphin brain, its very different way of perceiving the world, particularly through echolocation, is highly inspiring.

I did not know that the US Navy uses Low Frequency Active Sonar (LFAS) that turns out to be a highly destructive technology that causes extreme suffering, bleeding, disorientation and permanent physical damage, including death, to cetaceans. The navy just started using this technology in 2003, when this book was written, and it was not being deterred by animal rights activism and scientists. I don’t know what the navy has done with LFAS since, but if it has applied it as planned, there must be carnage out there now. I need to do online research to confirm this.

DeMares’ book is a must-read for anyone interested in cetaceans, cetacean intelligence, alien linguistics and alien studies (since I consider dolphins aliens in a true sense of the word).

I have made jokes about his: We humans always wonder what it would be like if aliens landed on earth. They clearly would not speak English. Would we be able to communicate? Absolutely not. We have aliens living in our midst, all over the oceans, the cetaceans. They are just as smart as we are, yet very few humans have ever had anything resembling a conversation with a dolphin. We have walked this earth, if you include our earliest ancestors climbing on trees in Africa, for about 6 million years. Cetaceans have been here for 20 to 50 million years. Yet, we have no connection with them.

DeMares has helped with positive progress in  this quest with Dolphins, Myth & Transformation.

Rating: ***

Into the Deep – by Ken Grimwood

If you read my post about Replay, Ken Grimwood’s time travel novel, you would have seen my reference to Starsea, a movie that takes a central role in the plot of Replay.

Into the Deep is the story of Starsea. Dolphins, and cetaceans in general, are presented as sentient beings with a level of intelligence equaling that of humans. In the book, we get to know four human protagonists, a marine biologist, an investigative journalist, a petroleum engineer and a tuna boat captain. The four become, through the course of the story, interconnected and end up collaborating at the end, as unlikely as it would seem at the beginning. We also get to know many dolphins, with names like Ch*Tril, Qr/Tal, Tk/Lin, etc. The author does a wonderful job telling the story from the point of view of the dolphins, and we start thinking like they do, we view humans like a dolphin would.

We humans can visually look around a room and see a bottle of wine on the coffee table, a painting on the wall, a candle burning in the mantle of the fire place, and the television set on, sending pictures our way, all with a scan of our eyes, taking in object shapes, textures of those objects, colors and opacity of the objects.

Dolphins can see like we do. However, they can also echo locate, sending ultrasound signals out into dark or murky water and hear the echoes coming back like a submarine’s sonar. Using no vision at all, a dolphin can create a picture in its brain with that same level of detail. It can ’see’ a coin on the bottom of the sea, a lobster crawling, a rock in its way, and it could determine the texture and shape of those objects, as clear as we can do it with vision. But it goes a little further. Since it’s sonar, the dolphin can look right through soft tissue and ’see’ the skeletal structure underneath, of humans, sharks or other dolphins. If a dolphin were to have a racing heart due to an adrenaline rush from being frightened, another dolphin would clearly see that racing heart. A dolphin can draw conclusion about another dolphin from seeing inside like we humans can when we see somebody blushing, perhaps.

The dolphins call the humans land-walkers. They see them only from a distance, except when they come out to the sea in strange, fragile hulls with large white dorsal fins on top of them. The dolphins observe the humans and think of them as communication handicapped, since they apparently can only communicate by flapping their front-mounted blowholes making crude noises in a narrow frequency band.

Here is an excerpt from the point of view of one dolphin that has swum up to a beach where he is surrounded by a bunch of people delighted about his appearance:

Then he turned his attention to the young ones. They swarmed around him, reaching out to touch him with the squirmy little growths that sprouted from the ends of their upper appendages. He allowed the contact, even enjoyed it when they stroked him gently; but he remained alert, because each of those wriggling growths was tipped with something hard and sharp, like miniature crawler-claws. He’d received a few painful scrapes on his delicate skin during the first few of these encounters, but the young ones seemed more careful now, and usually onely touched him with the soft pads beneath their claws.

One young female, smaller than the others, was standing hesitantly aside from the boisterous group that had rushed to meet and touch him. Tk/Lin scanned her internally and saw that her heart was racing, the muscles around her stomach were tight. An adult male was urging her forward in the water, but she held back, clearly afraid.

Tk/Lin peeled away from the crowed of fearless young ones around him and made his way slowly, ever so slowly, toward the trembling little female. he stopped two beak-to-flukes from her and raised his head above the surface, swaying it to and fro in a gentle rhythm timed to mimic the normal land-walker heartbeat. The young one watched, entranced, but  still she clung to the lower limbs of the long male behind her.

Two of the bigger young ones came splashing toward Tk/Lin, eager for more active play, but he warned  them away with a slight thwap! of his flukes against the water. They retreated, and Tk/Lin turned his attention once more the the frightened little female. Keeping his distance from her, he rolled methodically from one side to the other, showing her his dorsal, his pectoral fins, his soft white belly. She watched in silence, her eyes round.

One of the many-colored spherical things filled with air that the young ones often tossed to Tk/Lin was floating nearby. he nudged it with his beak, and it rolled across the placid surface to the young female. She reflexively let go of the adult’s limbs and caught it between her own upper appendages. She stared at the toy for a moment, then at Tk/Lin, and gave the weightless sphere a push back in his direction. He chittered his approval and bounced it back toward her, a little harder this time.

The young one’s face contorted, her mouth curling upward at the sides in the land-walker gesture that Tk/Lin had learned to recognize as indicative of amusement or contentment. She slapped the toy back again, through the air above the surface; her aim was off, but Tk/Lin easity darted to meet it and toss it back to her. The young one squealed and tossed the brightly colored sphere again and again, ignoring the adult behind her. Her muscles were relaxed now, Tk/Lin scanned, her heartbeat steady and normal.

As I stated in my review of Replay, I am fascinated by the concept of cetacean intelligence and I will write some blog entries about that subject alone shortly.

Into the Deep, of course, is a fictional story, with a plot line that stretches a bit beyond where I would have taken it, but it’s wrapped into basic concepts that are fascinating and entertaining.

Rating: ****

Replay – by Ken Grimwood

Here is a unique book in a number of respects:

1. How I came to know about it, even though it was written in 1986.
2. How it fits into my recent readings (time travel stories).
3. How some of the effects in the book reminded me of effects in The Accidental Time Machine.
4. How some of the passages remind me of my own life.

Over the holidays, my friend Brian and I talked about books, and he told me about Replay. I said I’d look for it, but as it goes with such conversations, I forgot the title and never ended up following through. One Monday morning I arrived at my desk and it was in my inbox. He must have come by my office and dropped it off for me while I was out of town.

I love reading stories with time travel or similar effects and this book fits the genre perfectly. If you search this blog for books, you will find The Fermata, Time Pressure, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Accidental Time Machine, all out of that category. I’d love to write a book like this.

Now I have to talk about the effect. First, you must note that the author published the book in 1986, smack in the middle of the Reagan administration. The protagonist is Jeff Winston, a man born in 1945 who started going to college in 1963. He became a newspaper journalist, had a mediocre life, an unsatisfying marriage, mostly due to lack of resources. He died of a massive heart attack on October 18, 1988 at 1:06pm.

Much to his surprise and causing utter disorientation, he ‘wakes up’ in his college dorm room in 1963. After some serious confusion and bewilderment, he figures out that he is simply placed back in his old life, 25 years earlier, with all the characters of his old life still there, and they don’t have a clue. To them, this is just life. He, however, remembers everything. For instance, he remembers the outcome of a horse race with very long odds. So he scrapes up all the cash he can find, a few hundred dollars, bets it all on the horse, and wins $12,000. A few more bets on horses and the World Series, and he has a few million dollars. He does not have to try hard with the stock market before he is a very wealthy young man.

Eventually he makes his way to 1988 again, leading a totally different life this time around, only to die again and to wake up in 1963 a third time. There is a minor issue: there is ‘the skew.’ Every time he goes back in time he drops forward a little bit. So when he arrived in 1963 the first time, it was May 1963. The next time it was a few days later. Then it was months later, and so on. The replays kept getting shorter on a logarithmic scale. This is an interesting effect somewhat analogous to Haldeman’s Accidental Time Machine, where the jumps are on a linear multiple factor, both spatially as well as temporally.

I don’t want to tell you more about the story or the plot in case you want to read this, so I will leave it at this. But I do want to elaborate on how there are passages that remind me of my own life.

There is a subplot that involves dolphins and dolphin research, which was of particular interest to me in the 1988 time frame, when I was seriously considering going back to college for Cognitive Science. I wanted to use computer science (the field I was in), coupled with linguistics (having studied six languages myself) and alien intelligence (dolphins) to research human / dolphin communications. I never ended up in that field, partly due to lack of resolve on my part, and excuses that I had small children at the time that needed the attention, and economics – I couldn’t afford to take time off to start another career. During that time in my life, I read Dr. Lilly’s books on dolphin intelligence and studied up on his research of dolphin linguistics.

In Replay, one of the characters creates a major popular movie, named Starsea, that centers around dolphins, which in turn inspires a young student to study Lilly’s work, linguistics and computer science and work at U.C. San Diego in Marine Biology. Reading that was eerie, this could have been myself, and to think about Grimwood writing about that at the same time I was considering such a career, but finding out now, in 2009, had me marvel about synchronicity.

Incidentally, if you are interested in fascinating science fiction involving sentient dolphins, read David Brin’s uplift series, starting with Startide Rising.

Back to Replay: This was a hugely entertaining book, well written, an inspiring story with a good message to boot.

Rating: ****

P.S. Ken Grimwood died of an apparent heart attack  at the age of 59 on June 6, 2003 at his home in Santa Barbara.