Volume 27, Number 4 · March 20, 1980
Monkey Business
By Martin Gardner
Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language
by Herbert S. Terrace
Knopf, 303 pp., $15.00
Speaking of Apes: A Critical Anthology of Two-Way Communication with Man
edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, edited by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Plenum, 469 pp., $37.50
Remember the great tumult during the Sixties about talking dolphins? Because a dolphin brain is larger than ours, could it be that porpoises are potentially as bright as we are, maybe more so? John C. Lilly seriously tried teaching English to these clever little whales and for a time actually believed he had taught dolphins to mimic human speech. Like the black races of Africa, Lilly once said, porpoises are on the brink of becoming Westernized, a revolution with unpredictable consequences. 'If dolphins come to understand our cold war,' he warned, 'we don't know how they will proceed to operate.'
Review, 3549 words
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