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Brother Apes 85 become closely and emotionally associated with their study animals begin to imbue them with a sense of self. Lilly reportedly cautioned the Green Bank conferees that we may have been duped by the mimicry we taught dolphins.** Dolphin sentience casts doubt on the widespread assumption that tool- manipulating appendages are vital to the development of superior intelli- gence. However, large-brained cetaceans seem to have reached an evolutionary impasse. Because dolphins are highly adapted to the sea, they are unlikely to develop advanced technology.” Jill Tarter extended this idea to SETI. “If the universe is teeming with beautiful worlds of water, populated by the super intelligent analogs of terrestrial dolphins and whales, lacking manipulative organs and any tech- nology, then no passive search strategy will detect them directly. Their presence will only be deduced, if at all, by inference from an observed non-equilibrium chemistry in the biospheres of those planets.” A Mirror Image. Geophysicist Norman Sleep suggested that intelligent deep-sea organisms might come up with many reasons why intelligence could not arise on land.” Evolutionary biologist Bruce Fleury argued that dolphins and whales can serve as useful analogs for our hoped-for communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. They live in a medium with physical properties different from our own. They navigate, communicate, and may even think in terms of a different sensory modality.” Communications between humans and dolphins may involve a transfor- mation between their auditory world and our visual world. Dolphins might have an active intellectual life, but one based on different processes than our own; their thinking may be opaque to us. Despite decades of research, we still are unable to communicate in a substantive way with dolphins, an evolutionary product of our own bio- sphere. “If we fail here,” predicted zoologist N.J. Berrill, “we will fail everywhere else as well.” Lilly was more optimistic, foreseeing that the space sciences would benefit from our having established contact here on Earth with alien crea- tures that had an evolutionary development separate from ours. At most, though, we will have graduated from the kindergarten of interspecies communication. The continuity of the human mind with the animal mind is the most impor- tant question in human evolution. ware: annc44 Brother Apes —William L. Abler, Field Museum, 2005*4