An Aside...Michael H. Cohen Reports that "Dolphins Sing the Blues"
Yesterday, Michael H. Cohen, author of the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Law Blog, reported that "Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song." While the headline is amusing to some, Cohen questions the activity, asking "why dolphins are taught to sing the theme from Batman and not Beethoven's Ninth."
He continues,
Maybe the discrepancy has to do with the fact that I've placed this post under the heading of "ethical issues," whereas others have questioned whether recording the dolphins will raise intellectual property issues.
I noticed that a related article is entitled, Dolphins better at networking than the Web. Which is where my intuitive leap had intially gone: the question for science is not what songs dolphins can learn from the warped parts of our minds . . . . The question is rather what tunes we can learn from the dolphins.
"People who develop complex networks, like the World Wide Web or electricity grids, could learn a lot from the social behaviour of dolphins, a New Zealand zoologist has found.
David Lusseau, a zoologist at the University of Otago spent seven years observing a community of 64 bottlenose dolphins in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand, and found they have a social structure similar to human and human-made networks.
Cohen concludes,
Our dolphin friends may just be a leap or two ahead of our own ability to communicate through the five senses. Training dolphins to repeat commercialized popular culture for our own entertainment seems like throwing the precious pearl of consciousness to the swine of instant gratification.
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Michael H. Cohen is the President of the the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine, also known as the Institute for Health, Ethics, Law, Policy & Society. The Institute serves as a reliable forum for investigation and recommendations regarding the legal, regulatory, ethical, and health policy issues involved in the judicious integration of complementary and alternative medical therapies (such as acupuncture and traditional oriental medicine, chiropractic, massage therapy, herbal medicine) and conventional clinical care.
