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Dr. Ridgway’s talking whale
This is either Bella or Lugosi, the two beluga whales at the Vancouver Public Aquarium when I visited in the early 1970′s.
The findings open up the possibility of teaching white whales how to speak, but that effort might not be worthwhile, Ridgway suggests.
“They readily learn,” he said. “I think they could be taught many sounds. I do not know that teaching speech would be scientifically worthwhile.”
As I read that last sentence, a series of strange feelings passed over me in rapid succession. One was anger. Another was sheer astonishment at the lack of imagination displayed. And finally, a pervasive and disheartening sense of futility.
I think the anger came from seeing something of profound value to me tossed aside by someone who was in a position to exploit it but chose not to essentially because of a prejudice. The prejudice being, of course, against the whale; that the whale had nothing to say and was simply making human noises to amuse itself and startle the occasional innocent diver in its tank.
Dolly, the dolphin who courted me, worked very hard to get me to mimic her for just a few minutes. When I finally mastered the sound she’d been trying to teach me all along, she went nuts, splashing around her pen and throwing water into the air. Ridgway had a beluga who TRIED TO COMMUNICATE WITH HIM FOR FOUR YEARS, and aside from recording its sounds on a sonograph to prove his “fish story,” Ridgway didn’t investigate further.
From my point of view, infuriating.
At the New York City Aquarium in the early 1970′s.
You know who else really can’t get consent from their partners? SCIENTISTS. In fact, the whole idea of getting consent from experimental animals is preposterous… white rats signing release forms?… EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF CETACEANS. Apparently whatever kind of science Ridgway wants to practice is independent of the cooperation of the research subject. Or the research subject is coerced into performing. Don’t think a captive dolphin or whale (a beluga is actually a large white dolphin species) doesn’t know which side its fish are buttered on!
How could Ridgway’s science NOT benefit from being able to talk to a whale? Think about the kind of experiments that would be possible from a cooperative, informed subject! I have heard it said that the foundations of the process for scientific inquiry into a subject were laid largely by William of Occam, based on the principles of interrogation established by the Spanish Inquisition. I do not know if this is true, but Ridgway’s uninformed, unimaginative and narrow-minded comment makes me afraid it is.
Furthermore, I wonder why Ridgway waited almost 30 years to publish. (OK, I admit that’s like the pot calling the kettle black but he was publishing a scientific paper, not a tell-all autobiographical novel. I wrote, and threw away, several drafts of Wet Goddess before I found one that worked.)
Viegas writes, At the time, Ridgway presented the news at a scientific conference, but the work was not funded and became lost in the research shuffle until more recently, when colleagues encouraged him to publish the data.
Is this the crux of the matter, then? Did Ridgway actually want to study the vocalizations of NOC (as the whale was known) but find himself frustrated by a lack of funding? What does “became lost in the research shuffle” mean? Who’s to blame for this shortcoming of science? Could it be… JOHN C. LILLY, M.D.?
What, I ask myself, is unique about Ridgway’s observations? Didn’t Lilly (and his often uncredited research assistant Margaret Howe) record hours of tape and miles of sonograph paper charting subjects like Elvar and Peter Dolphin trying to learn English?
Maybe several things it turns out. First, NOC’s vocalizations were spontaneous. Lilly’s dolphins were conditioned, rewarded for vocalizing by getting to socialize with the trainer, not with fish. Second, Ridgway is a recognized marine biologist; Lilly was an M.D. specializing in neurochemistry and brain probing before getting into human-dolphin communication. Third, Ridgway got published in Current Biology; because he wasn’t a marine biologist, Lilly had to publish the reports of his attempted language acquisition studies in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, where they were easily overlooked by mainstream biologists.
And finally, I feel a sense of futility because I remember how fast I progressed with Dolly and I think about Ridgway having NOC for the four years that he tried to speak to us and, and I feel envious. I wonder what I could have accomplished in that time, and whether it would even have meant anything to scientists like Ridgway.
At the Vancouver Public Aquarium, early 1970′s.
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