concretely contrast the performance of the large brains of man 

 with his hands to the smaller brains of the primates with their 

 hands. When we consider the whales, we seem obsessed, as it 

 were, with the necessity of our own nature to look for an analog 

 of the hand and the manipulative ability. May it not be better to 

 find a more general principle than just handedness and its use ? 



I suggest that we think more in terms of a physiologically ap- 

 propriate set of more general mechanisms which may subsume 

 several other human functions under the same principle. It 

 seems to me that we must look for abilities to develop gen- 

 eralized dexterity of use for certain kinds of end purposes for 

 any or all muscular outputs from the central nervous system. If 

 there is a task to be done, such as lifting a stone, whether in 

 water or air, a given animal may turn it over with his foot, with 

 his flipper, with his hand, with his tail, or with any other body 

 part with which he could obtain a purchase on the stone. The 

 end task is turning over the stone, to obtain food or whatever. 

 It makes little difference what kind of muscular equipment he 

 uses just so he uses it appropriately. 



Let me illustrate with a more complex example seen in our 

 own laboratory. A baby dolphin was being nursed in a small 

 tank artificially. It apparently needed the constant attention of 

 a human attendant. Its mother had not been caught with it. 

 After several days it discovered that if it banged on the bottom 

 of the tank with its flipper in a rhythmic fashion it could bring 

 the humans from the other room. (We heard a loud thumping 

 sound transmitted from a hydrophone in its tank.) Previous to 

 this it attempted to bring the humans from the other room by 

 whistling the distress call of the dolphins ; unlike its mother, the 

 humans did not respond to the whistle. In a sense this distress 

 call is in his instinctual pattern for obtaining food and aid by 

 other dolphins. The secondary adaptation and the new effort 

 was that of manipulating the flipper rather than the phonation 

 mechanism in the blowhole. Thus driven by whatever the in- 



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