Science Friday - Social Media Chaos, Remembering Whale Song Scientist Roger Payne. June 23, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

We have a new podcast! It's called Universe Of Art, and it features conversations with artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.    When The Promise Of Social Media Becomes Perilous Despite social media’s early promises to build a more just and democratic society, over the past several years, we’ve seen its propensity to easily spread hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Online platforms have even played a role in organizing violent acts in the real world, like genocide against the Rohinga people in Myanmar, and the violent attempt to overturn the election at the United States capitol. But how did we get here? Has social media fundamentally changed how we interact with the world? And how did big tech companies accumulate so much unchecked power along the way?   Remembering Roger Payne, Who Helped Save The Whales Americans haven’t always loved whales and dolphins. In the 1950s, the average American thought of whales as the floating raw materials for margarine, animal feed, and fertilizer—if they thought about whales at all. But twenty-five years later, things changed for cetaceans in a big way. Whales became the poster-animal for a new environmental movement, and cries of “save the whales!” echoed from the halls of government to the whaling grounds of the Pacific. What happened? Shifting attitudes were due, in large part, to the work of scientist Roger Payne, who died earlier this month at the age of 88. His recordings helped to popularize whalesong, and stoked the public imagination about intelligent underwater creatures who used vocalizations to communicate. In 2018, our podcast “Undiscovered” explored the history of Payne’s work, and that of his colleagues. We’re featuring this episode as a way of remembering his life and groundbreaking work.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll remember the life and work of Roger Payne, a scientist whose recordings helped to save the whales. But first, it's become pretty normal to be glued to our smartphones, constantly checking social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, you know what I'm talking about. And beyond just feeling stuck in an endless loop of distraction, we've seen the propensity for social media to easily spread hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation and even play a role in organizing violent acts in the real world, like genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and closer to home, the January 6th violent attempt

to overturn the election at the Capitol. But how did we get here? Has social media fundamentally changed how we interact with the world? And how did big tech companies accumulate so much unchecked power along the way? Those questions are all addressed in a new book, authored by Max Fisher. It's called The Chaos Machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds in our world. He's also an international reporter and columnist for the New York Times based in Los Angeles. Max, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Sarah. Very happy to be here. I want to start with what I think is the central argument in your book. It's not just that bad actors use social media to their advantage. These outcomes are actually baked into how these platforms are designed.

Why is this such an important distinction to make? For so long, we thought, and I include myself on this when I started on this project a few years ago, that the big harms of social media came from Russian hackers, extremists, but the more that I looked at it, really significant effects at this platform, or of these platforms, I should say, and the way that it subtly changes how we think, how we consume information, even form our own identities and our own sense of right and wrong. And it's easy to miss that because for any individual, the effect is subtle.

But when you multiply that out by billions of users, and we have lots of empirical research that definitively shows this now, the effect is to change overall how society works. So there's a study that I like to cite a few years ago. These researchers took a bunch of people in this experiment, and they said, okay, log on to this social media platform that we have mocked up to look like Twitter and send a post that expresses some level of outrage, whether you want to or not. And then they showed those users as if they had received lots of likes and shares and engagement and comments.

And what they quickly found was that those users, regardless of how prone to outrage they had been beforehand, suddenly had this desire to send more and more posts with outrage in it. But what really blew my mind about this was that those research subjects became, even when they were away from the experiment, became more prone to feeling outrage and to expressing outrage as people. What I understand you're saying is that the social media designers know about this foible that we have and they purposely design it to amplify divisiveness between groups.

It's not as if there's like a big dial in Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg is like turning it up to say more outrage in society. The way that this kind of happened is that the engineers who designed these systems and these very powerful artificial intelligence systems, they want you to spend more time in the platforms and they want you to act in certain ways, whatever ways the system determines will get you to spend more time online and get you to encourage other uses to spend more time online. But we now know that the effect of that from lots of research, including researchers and alarm raises within the companies themselves, that the result of that is several things, but above all else, moral outrage, us versus them, tribalism, and a sense of heightened identity conflict. And they've known this for years and they haven't changed anything. How did the founders of social media companies come to shape the type of tools they want to develop? So it's two forces that came together. The big one that I think a lot of

are familiar with are ideology, that technology can and should change the world. It should displace and tear down the old outdated institutions, the old norms, the old ways of doing things, and replace them with this new populist, decentralized, purely democratic way of running the world. But then the other element that you have that comes into this are the economics. When you started company in Silicon Valley, the way that these companies got funded was through something called venture capital. You would have an investor who would come in. They would want to give a company a bunch of money, not necessarily so that the company would slowly accrue a profit over time, and over many years they would make their money back, but rather so that the company would

sell quickly. And the way that you do that really quickly and for a really high return is by building the largest user base you possibly can. And in fact, what happened within a few years of this was that the companies realized that they had, and there's some internal memos that are absolutely fascinating where they talk about this openly, that they had basically maxed out the pool of human attention in the world. There are only so many people, and we each have only so many minutes in the day. And so if your business model is you have to get 10 times as many eyeballs on your site, and each person has to be spending 10 times as much time on there, you run out of good ways to do it. And you end up in this arms race where you,

have to get bigger and better technology, more and more sophisticated systems to manipulate people. And they used to be quite open about this, to manipulate people and to adip people to your platform so they will spend more time on. And in fact, you have a story in your book about Myanmar as a social laboratory for all of this and how effective it can be. Tell us about that. Yeah, Myanmar is a fascinating and cautionary tale. So I was in Myanmar first in 2014. And the two big groups to arrive in the country were the U.S. government, which was helping to orchestrate the opening up to the West. It had been this closed off military dictatorship for a long time in the Silicon Valley tech companies, which at that point were seen as these kind of harbingers of democratic revolution. And the reason that these social media companies did this was because they needed to keep growing their user base. They had basically run out of users and develop Western countries. And they saw the global South as this opportunity. They thought we can go in and we can train an entire society to use our platforms as the primary vehicle for accessing the internet. And that will create a user base that

will one day be so valuable that we can bring that to our shareholders now, bring that to investors now. And the way that they did this was very cany. They went into these countries where it's very expensive to access the internet. You don't do it through a computer. You do it through a smartphone. And you have to pay for every little bit of data you use, which is prohibitively costly. And they said, okay, we're going to make a deal with cell carriers. You buy a cell phone or me and R, which most people were doing for the first time. And it is going to come preloaded with this Facebook app. If you use the internet through the Facebook app, it's free.

Anything you do on it is free. And what that means is that, and I saw this firsthand when I was there, an entire society thinks that Facebook is the internet. But what makes that so consequential is that everything that they do is filtered through these same artificial intelligence algorithms that are designed to serve them the specific kinds of content and the specific ways that will be maximally engaging to them. And what we very quickly learned in Myanmar is that that was racism, hate speech, excitement, and you could watch it spin up where these rumors and these hate speech groups that previously had been pretty obscure or had

not had that much of reach, all of a sudden exploded on social media because the platforms is boosting them. And you would start to see riots. You would start to see mobs that were overrunning members of the country's Muslim minority. And Facebook and the other platforms got warning after warning. Something really bad is going to happen. We know where this is going. And then in 2017, if you years into this, it helped contribute to, of course, was not the only cause, but helped contribute to Myanmar slide into one of the worst genocides of the 21st century. Awful, awful. I can recall a panic in the 90s and the early aught about how TV was riding our brains. I mean, I mean violent video games making teens more violent.

You argue that social media is fundamentally different from other types of mass media. And interestingly, you compare it to smoking. Tell us about that. The big difference is that what we have now with social media is mountains and mountains of empirical hard research into what being on social media does that has repeatedly affirmed that it changes your behavior, changes your cognition in ways that were never true of video games or listening to, you know, M&M cassette tapes. Similarly, with cigarettes for many decades, we had hard research that over and over said that not only your cigarettes addictive, not only did they give you cancer, but in fact, just as these social media platforms are deliberately designed in a way that produces

these foreseeable harms, cigarettes were deliberately instilled with specific chemicals that were meant to addict consumers and that were knowingly harmful to them. And another parallel with Big Tobacco is that something that we learned in, I think, the 90s, was that Big Tobacco had been doing their own research, that had repeatedly been finding, our products are addictive, our products cause cancer. And the same is true as social media. Francis Hogan, remember the Facebook researcher who leaked a bunch of internal Facebook documents, had all of these reports finding that Facebook's own researchers were looking into, you know,

what does our platform duty users? What are the effects? And they were finding the exact same thing that these independent researchers were finding just as their executives, again, like big tobacco executives, were coming out and saying, no, no, no, there's nothing to this. Our product is fine. You know, it's a neutral amplifier of things that are already in the culture. It couldn't possibly be causing all of these things. So I think that there's been a kind of broader cultural ship and understanding that, okay, maybe this is a little bit different. But what happened with cigarettes back in the day was that they were regulated. The surgeon general put warnings on boxes. Advertising was regulated. Do you see regulation as an answer to this in social media?

This is the big debate right now. And it's a really hard question because people do need social media. I mean, it is so essential and has made itself so essential to our lives at this point that it's hard to just say, you know, oh, we'll just turn it off or we'll just shut down the companies. the kind of two schools of thought on regulation are, one is to say that these are akin to the cigarette companies, and we should just say, look, these products are innately harmful. So the only appropriate response is, as we did with cigarettes, to try to regulate out the harms, but of course the big effort with cigarettes wasn't to change the underlying product. So the only effective thing we can do is make them harder to access.

But there is, I should say, another school of thought. And honestly, I think it's too really to say which of these is right that says that actually maybe we can with more kind of surgically precise regulation shift the incentives of the companies to create a version of social media that is not so harmful and not so destructive. Well, if it makes any less money for the companies, I don't hold that much hope for that happening, Max. Yeah, I think I share your view, unfortunately. Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine, The Insight Story of How Social Media

rewired our minds and our world. Thank you for spending some time with us. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Coming up after the break, remembering Roger Payne, with the story of how a moth researcher became the world's leading expert on Whale Sok and how his recordings help to spark a global effort to save the whales. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. There are only a few scientists whose work can be directly linked to the preservation of a species. Well, one such scientist died earlier this month. I'm talking about Roger Payne,

the man who brought the songs of the humpback whale to the public consciousness. Pain died at his home in Vermont at the age of 88, after spending a career dedicated to researching the symphony of sounds whales make to call to each other. These songs became a wake-up call to humans, who began to see whales and dolphins very differently than they had. throughout history. Iceland, Norway, and Japan are the only countries in the world that still permit whaling. This week, Iceland's government said it will suspend this year's fin whale hunting until the end of August, due to animal welfare concerns. A move some hope will lead to the end of commercial whaling there. Back in 2018, our podcast Undiscovered looked at the impact of Payne's work

and that of his colleagues, and we wanted to bring you that story as a way of remembering his life. Here's our host, Annie Minoff and Ella Fedder. Every year, 13 million people go out onto the water to watch whales and dolphins. Just watch them. Those are a few of those people. That's a boat full of whale watchers in Baja. And chances are they paid good money to do this. We spend $2 billion a year to watch whales and dolphins, like $2 billion with a bee,

which might seem a little excessive, like a little over the top. Except it turns out everything about our love for whales and dolphins is just a little bit over the top. Like, you know, we've got the T-shirts with the leaping turquoise dolphins on the front. The sunset in the background. Exactly. We listen to albums of whale song. And if we get a chance to touch, you know, actually pet a whale's barnacle-encrusted snout, we just lose it. Yes.

Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah, that guy did. I have to say, if I heard that sound out of context, not sure I would have figured out it was about a guy petting a whale. I did think about that. Yeah. Anyway, we love whales and dolphins.

Yes. So much. It's actually hard for us to imagine ever not feeling this way. Except that we did. We felt very differently about these animals not that long ago. This guy, Roger Payne, he remembers it, and he remembers specifically what happened one March afternoon in the mid-60s. Yes, I was teaching at Tufts University.

Roger was an assistant professor in biology, and one day he's working in his lab. And I heard over just the local radio station, oh, there's a whale washed ashore on Revere Beach. And I thought, oh, great, I've never seen a whale. I'd love to go see one. So Roger jumps in his car, but by the time he gets to the beach, the sun's already set. It's dark out. It's raining hard. All of the other whale gockers have gone home, so it's just Roger out there,

and he's scanning the beach with his flashlight. And I walked around the beach and found the whale, and it wasn't a whale. It was a dolphin. Roger points out that dolphins are technically whales. It's just not the kind of whale that we usually think about. They're cetaceans, full-time aquatic mammals, just like sperm whales, blue whales, and porpoises. And anyway, Roger isn't splitting hairs at this point.

In this moment, he's just focused on what people had done to this dolphin. Somebody had carved their initials in the flank of this dolphin. Someone else had cut off its tail and tail was missing. Somebody else had stuffed a cigar butt in the blowhole of this dolphin. And I was just overwhelmingly shocked and depressed by the thought that this seems to be what happens when humans encounter these animals. Roger stood there for a long time. He stood there so long that his flashlight battery gave out.

There was a source of lights in the distance, and I could see the silhouette of the curves, the glistening curves of this beautiful creature, and thought to myself, you know, there's got to be something different in how people deal with these animals when they encounter them. Roger didn't know it then, but things were about to be very, very different for whales and dolphins.

In a little over a decade, we'd go from thinking, like maybe it's okay to stick my cigar butt in this animal's blowhole to this. All right. Is she kissing that way? Okay. And this transformation would happen in very large part because of one scientific discovery. So it's about the mid-60s and Roger decides he's going to do something for whales. But what exactly Roger can do?

Not totally clear, at least not from the outside. Roger doesn't have a lot of activism experience. And he doesn't even study cetaceans. He studies sound how animals make it, use it, hear it. He's looked at bats and owls. But at this point in his career, he's all about moths. Moths. How they avoid bats by hearing the direction from which a bat is coming.

Not really clear how a moth expert is going to save the whales. But Roger's got a bigger problem. And that is how much most people in 60s America just do not care about whales. A hundred years ago, the Moby Dick era, whales were monsters. They were feared and respected. By the 60s, they're just commodities. Which, as it turns out, they do serve pretty well as industrial commodities. That's historian D. Graham Burnett.

He wrote a book called The Sounding of the Whale about the history of whale science. Graham says by the 60s, whales were being taken. transformed into just a dizzying array of truly disgusting industrial products. Stuff like granulated bone meal, which was a fertilizer. Desiccated meat gravel. Which was a cheap feed for chickens. But he says the real money wasn't something else. By far the highest dollar value was actually ready yourself.

Marjorin. In mid-century Europe, you cannot believe it's not butter. and you really don't want to know that it's hydrogenated whale oil. And by 1963, whales are being turned into butter at a rate that is making even whalers nervous. Scientists are reporting that there may be as few as 650 blue whales left in the entire Antarctic, and there aren't that many more humpbacks. For whales, things are looking really bad. For dolphins, less so, although hundreds of thousands are dying every year in tuna nets.

But there was actually one group of people around this time who did care about dolphins and whales. And they cared quite a lot, actually, because they had to. And those people were the U.S. Navy. Real number nine, we're playing humpbacks. Today's the sixth of February, 96th. So in the 50s and 60s, the U.S. Navy, they are compiling this gigantic catalog of underwater animal sounds.

Like, you've got Navy researchers headed out with underwater microphones, They're recording whales and dolphins and snapping shrimp and sea robins and spotfish. That's my favorite one because you've got to wait for it. And they're doing this for one very good reason. There were Soviet submarines in those oceans. And you wanted to know when one of those was passing by. And that meant you had to be able to hear it. I mean, this was the Cold War.

If you could not tell a moaning whale from a Russian submarine, you were screwed. And so the Navy engineers who are listening to these whale tapes, it's not like they're having an aesthetic experience. Yeah, they're not doing it for fun. Right. Like, I think today we're kind of primed to hear these sounds and think, like, calming nature CD, spa music. But Graham says the guys who are listening to these tapes,

that's not how they were hearing them. Nobody thought of it as song. Nobody thought of it as music. People thought of it as noise. But to Roger, this was interesting noise. A few years before he saw that dead dolphin on the beach, he'd actually heard some of the Navy's whale recordings. And he thought, maybe there's something that I, animal sound expert, can do for these animals.

Because I can study these sounds. At that point, it was just an idea, something he was thinking about, not something he acted on. But after he sees this dead dolphin, he comes back to it. And he decides to go searching for more of these whale recordings and ends up finding the mother load in the collection. of one Navy sonar engineer. He still remembers the day that this engineer hands him a pair of headphones threads this tape onto a tape machine and calls out.

I think it's a humpback whale. The sounds that I heard were absolutely transforming. They were shocking. I had never heard any animal make any sound even approximately as intriguing and commanding. It was incredible. Roger grew up listening to classical music. He's a pretty serious amateur cellist, plays a lot of chamber music.

He thinks maybe that played into his reaction. But for whatever reason, when Roger heard these sounds, he didn't hear noise like the Navy did. He heard music. And to hear Roger tell it, this is the moment he has the idea. You know, if we could get humanity to hear these sounds, we could get them interested in Wales probably enough to do something about it. He thought this sound, this is how we saved the whales. Except he didn't actually know what that sound was.

As a music lover, Roger was intrigued by the musicality of it. As a scientist, he is stumped. He has no clue. Roger estimates it had been about a year since he saw that dead dolphin on the beach. It was 1967. 64,000 whales died that year. That's an average of one whale every eight minutes. So this is what Roger's up against. This is what he's trying to stop.

And all he has is this tape. But Roger's about to have something else. Roger is about to have an ally. An unconventional scientist who'd spent two years of his life trying to teach dolphins how to speak English. And cultivating a truly fantastic dolphin impression. And together, this scientific odd-com. we're about to make whale history. Listening to a story from our podcast Undiscovered from 2018 about the late Roger Payne,

one of the scientists who changed the way we think about whales and dolphins. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The guy that Roger was about to team up with to save the whales, his name was Scott McVeigh. And Scott is not your typical scientist. He writes poetry. He's a very proud English-Maid. But even though he didn't have, you know, the formal scientific credentials, back in the 60s, Scott was most definitely doing science.

Well, I was privileged to be working with a dolphin named Elvar. And it was my privilege to work with Elvar six days a week, morning and afternoon. Scott was a researcher at something called the Communication Research Institute in Miami. This was a dolphin lab set up in an old bank building of all places. So I'm like imagining the vaults and the dolphin tanks next to them. There were seven dolphins who they all lived in this old bank. And Elvar was one of them. He was the most precocious of these seven and maybe the most precocious dolphin we know of.

And this turned out to be pretty lucky because Scott's job was to try to teach Elvar to speak English. Scott's boss at the Communication Research Institute was this guy, big shot brain scientist named John C. Lilly. And by the early 60s, Dr. Lilly had come to a few conclusions about dolphins. A, that dolphins are super intelligent. B, they probably have their own language. And C, this is like the big one, they're actively trying to communicate with us. They're actually like bending the air coming out of their blowholes, trying to make sounds like English words.

And Dr. Lilly felt that we could actually help the dolphins along. Like we could eventually teach them to communicate in our language. Right. It would help to have an instructor when you're learning English. Why not humans? And Scott McBay, he's fascinated by all of this. I would want to do this. I mean, who wouldn't want to do this, right? He actually quits.

He has this stable job as an administrator at Princeton University. Quit that job, moves his entire family down to Miami to work on this project, to teach dolphins English. Except like how do you? Yeah, where do you start? Grammar? Gerens? I don't know. Well, they started this way.

So Scott would stand next to Elvar's Dolphin Tank, and he would read off this list of random sounds. These are consonant vowel combinations. Sounded like this. E's, ooze, or. And he would come back with, he would give a response, and I'd give him a butterfish. and then at the very end of the session I would say in falsetto voice push it up a little bit

I would say the name of the institute I would say communication research institute and Elvar came back like now get that way that's a bastardization of the the beautiful thing he was trying to do.

In retrospect, this can sound a little far-fetched. But for Scott, this was really important. Dolphins suggested an answer to this very profound problem. The long loneliness. The long loneliness. This wasn't a term that Scott came up with. It's actually the title of an essay by the science writer Lauren Isley. And Isley had written that as children, we talk to animals,

typically dogs and cats, if they're the most likely critters. And they don't seem to be answering. And eventually we stop talking. It's like we try to have this back and forth with the animals in our lives and it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. And we basically conclude, like we're never going to have a back and forth conversation with another species. And he said that we have been in this long loneliness for a long time.

And now perhaps finally. There may be a chance to communicate with another species, interspecies communication. That's whale conservationist Scott McVeigh, speaking to our podcast, Undiscovered back in 2018. We're bringing you his story and that of his colleague Roger Payne on today's program, and we will be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're continuing our story about humans' lives. learning how to communicate with cetaceans, animals like whales and dolphins, and how capturing

their vocalizations led to a worldwide effort to save the whales. Reporters Annie Minoff and Ella Fetter reported this story for us back in 2018 on our podcast Undiscovered. They focused on the work of Scott McVeigh and Roger Payne. Payne had started his career researching moths before he turned his attention to the sea. He died earlier this month at the age of 88. Here's Annie. Roger Payne, the mothman, he got interested in cetaceans because he wanted to save them. But Scott McVeigh, he wanted to break through.

He wanted a meeting of the mines. And that's why a few years before Roger stands on that beach with the mutilated dolphin, Scott is already standing by Elver's dolphin tank doing this. And it's why he spends even longer analyzing the sounds that Elvar's making, which he does using a technology that's still pretty cutting edge at the time. We're talking about sound spectrographs. Historian Graham Burnett again. A kind of representation of sound that's familiar to everybody who mucks around with garage band,

but at the time was still, you know, very exciting. You could see sound. You could feed a sound into this spectrograph machine, and this stylus would etch out the frequencies onto this roll of paper. Sound in squiggles out. The idea being, you might notice. things in those scribbles, like patterns, complexities that your ears wouldn't hear. And Scott poured over these scrolls. He's looking, he's trying to do what his boss wants

him to do, which is find the ease, ooze, or syllables. See if dolphins are, yeah, doing the English syllables. Exactly. But he's also looking at something else. So Elvar spent a lot of time seemingly chatting back and forth with this other dolphin named Chi-Chi. Sounded a little bit like this. And Scott, he's eaves drop. He's trying to figure out what is that back and forth, is that dolphin language. But he doesn't get that far. Because about two years after Scott joins the dolphin lab, it's starting to implode. And the problem is his boss, Dr. John C. Lilly.

I mean, on the one hand, Lily is doing a fantastic job promoting dolphins, like he's killing it. He's writing about talking dolphins in Life magazine. He's going on late night. he's a large part of the reason you could turn on to TV by the 1970s, and hear a reporter say something like this. These animals, small whales known as dolphins, may be second in intelligence on this planet only to man. They have a complex language we have been unable to crack, although they obviously understand us. Lily is great at getting people really excited about dolphins. But his scientific results aren't exactly living up to the hype.

he's not publishing a lot, possibly because he's dropping a lot of acid. That would not help. It was the 60s. Maybe it would help. I mean, the creative process. Not the follow-through. The labs funders are understandably getting a little short on patients. But the real tragedy for Scott is what happens in 1965.

Elvar the Dolphin dies of pneumonia. And Scott is heartbroken. He moves home to Princeton, gets another university admin. job. And it kind of seems like that's it. You know, no more dolphins, no more ease, ooze, or a few years past the long loneliness stretches on. Until Scott hears this. That was Mothpough Roger Payne's beloved whale tape. This is the one he thought might save the whales. Roger had actually read an article of Scots in Scientific American. These two cetacean lovers, they start chatting. And pretty soon, Roger lent Scott his tape.

And when Scott hears these sounds, he's hooked, exactly like Roger. And after those years in the dolphin lab, he knows what you do with a long tape of cetacean sounds. You feed them into a spectrograph machine. Sound in, squiggles out. It turns out that on the Princeton campus, there's only one sound spectrograph. Scott found it in the basement in this Princeton professor's bird lab. And he convinces the guy to let him use the machine on nights and weekends. And pretty soon Scott's running off thousands of these paint.

paper strips to strip after strip of whale sound. Laying them out, looking them over. Just like he'd done with Elvar's sounds. And at first, this just seems like a cacophony of sounds. But then he sees it. Suddenly, it's you just get it. These sounds are not random. There's a pattern here.

So Scott takes his spectrogams to Roger to show him what he's seen, show him there is a pattern in these scrolls. And Roger does not need convincing. He says he'd heard this pattern. Now he could see it. And it works like this. You start with a unit. A unit is a sound which is continuous to your ear. So whoop, that would be a unit.

You string a few of those units together. Whoop, boom, boom. That would be what's called a phrase. String a few of those phrases together. Whoop, bum, boom, boom. Now you've got a theme. And what Roger and Scott saw on those strips of paper is that those themes repeat.

A whale would do theme A, theme B, theme C, and then a little while later he'd do it again, theme A, theme B, theme C. And that is a really big deal because... When any animal repeats itself in a rhythmic way, it is said to be singing, whether it is a cricket or a frog or a bird or a bat or a whale. That repetition, the fact that these themes are repeating

in the exact same pattern over and over, again, that meant that these sounds met some biologist's definition of song. And at a time where whaling nations are killing over 55,000 of these animals a year, that little bit of semantics matters. These animals that were killing for granulated bone meal and desiccated meat gravel and butter, these animals are singing. The first time that Roger Payne had heard the whale tape, he thought, if I could just get people to listen to these sounds,

would change for whales. Now he saw his chance to make the world listen, because he had whale song. And he was going to promote the hell out of it. He was going to warm it into pop culture whatever way he could. And that's exactly what he did. He goes on TV. He gives interviews about whale song. The sounds of some species may travel for a good many miles under water, under special circumstances. Roger gets his whale tape to the New York Philharmonic and convinces the orchestra to jam with his Dr. Payne's whale songs are now part of a concerto called, And God Created Great Whales, played this week for the first time by the New York Philharmonic. Roger tries to recruit pop stars to the cause, and he succeeds through sheer moxie,

like Judy Collins, famous folk singer. He goes to one of her performances, Benegles his way backstage and hands her, like he's handing a demo tape, like he gives her his whale tape. And in 1970, the world gets this. Farewell to Tarwati. Adieu moron to the dear land of crimand. I bid you fair... That's Judy Collins, duetting with a whale on her hit record, Wails and Nightingales.

Why are you laughing? That's your FM voice? Yeah. The whale tape that she's singing along to is one of Rogers. Roger even puts out his own record of whale songs, calls it Songs of the Humpback Whale. Descriptive. And Roger's record is a sleeper hit. It becomes the best-selling natural sounds album of all time.

And people are not just chilling with this record at home, right? This isn't your nature sounds for Insomniac's record. They're taking these sounds to the front lines in the battle to save the whales. Case in point, in 1975, this band of acts. activists from Vancouver, calling themselves Greenpeace, head out into the Pacific to intercept Soviet whaling ships. Okay, all hands on them. One, two, three, four, five over there.

There's one by the Vostok, and there's three over here. There's nine chasers altogether. On June 27th, Greenpeace spots one of these Soviet whaling ships. It's this hulking vessel called the Vostok. And the Greenpeace boat, it pulls up alongside this ship. And the activists start speaking to the Soviet crew through the Southwerellings. of loudspeakers, they're pleading with them to stop whaling. Hello, Vostar. We are Canadian.

We don't want you to kill the whales. Why must you do it? And the other thing these Greenpeace activists are doing, they're blasting Roger's whale record. Hours later, this confrontation comes to a head. head. The whalers shoot a harpoon straight over this tiny inflatable Greenpeace boat that the protesters have been maneuvering between the harpoon and the whale. The harpoon flies over the activist's heads, just 15 feet above them, hits the whale. Footage of this airs on news stations across North America.

And by now it was clear something had shifted. Like 10 years earlier, most people had not cared about whales. And now activists were literally shielding these animals with their bodies. And anyone who watched the evening news knew about it. We must begin to have respect for other life. Comrade dolphin and comrade whale. Because without them, the oceans begin to die. And if the oceans begin to die, we all begin to die. It would take another decade of international haggling.

but by the mid-80s, commercial whaling was a shadow of its former self. You're listening to a story from our podcast Undiscovered from 2018 about the late Roger Payne, one of the scientists who changed the way we think about whales and dolphins by popularizing Whale Song. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Did Whale Song save the whales? I would say Whale Song did save the whales. Historian Graham Burnett. In other words, it turns out that there is a powerful line between people's ears and their brains.

These sounds received as musical expression, warmed their way into the mind hearts of listeners, and created that powerful sense of social coordination, that can only be achieved in the kind of rhythmic and melodic structures of music. An anthem? An anthem. But, yes, an anthem. Roger Payne thought if people could just hear these sounds and understand them as song, they'd think about these animals differently.

They wouldn't think of them as monsters or butter or fertilizer, but as a species like us, one that's worth saving. And he was totally right. Song worked. Amazingly. Today some whale species are still struggling. There are a few populations that are even at risk of extinction, like the northern right whales. But a lot are coming back, especially humpbacks, the whales on Roger's record.

Roger Payne, for the most part anyway, he got what he wanted. But Scott McBae, Scott wrote something in his memoir that frankly surprised me. he wrote that after he discovered the pattern in the whale song, he felt depressed. Why did you feel depressed by it? Well, because, you know, even Caruso singing on a stage is interesting for a long time, but not forever. What I was hoping for was something that was back and forth. Back and forth. A conversation. Whale song changed the game for whales.

But it didn't end the long loneliness. We still don't have a back and forth with whales or dolphins, for that matter. Not in the way that Dr. Lilly thought we would. So the thing that Scott had been hoping for to break through to another species hasn't really happened. And that's basically where Roger and Scott's story ends. Or at least that's where we're going to leave them. But before we go, before you write off talking dolphins completely, a footnote. A footnote.

Because it turns out there is something pretty interesting about all those clicks and whistles that Scott was listening to. And it has to do with how complex those sounds are. So if you just forget dolphins for a second, like look at a human language like English, if I want to put a number to how complex English is, one thing that I could do is I could take a choice. chunk of spoken English, and I could graph out how often every sound in that chunk occurs. And then you math, math, math, math, math, math, math happens. That's Sherry Wells-Jensen. She's a linguist at Bowling Green State University. And you get a certain curve, right? You get a certain kind of line. That line is one measure of how complex a language is. And what linguists have known for a long

time is that if you look at a human language, doesn't really matter which one. It could be English or Hindi or Japanese. That line basically looks the language. And what language is that. It's same. It has that same baseline complexity. But then, in the 90s, Sherry says, these scientists did something really interesting. They started looking at animals. And they wanted to know, is there an animal out there that has the same line as human language? And at first it seems like maybe not. You know, they look at squirrel monkey communication. Not complex. And in fact, they look at human baby communication, like human baby babbling. That line, Doesn't look like the line for adult language.

So you're like, okay, animals don't seem to have this. Babies don't seem to have this. And then here comes the fun part. You look at dolphin communication and it has it. It's as complex. And when I first heard that, like cold shivers just went down my spine. Dolphins? They have this telltale complexity that even human babies don't have.

And that doesn't tell us what they're saying. It doesn't give us a way in. But it's just one more reason to think that this work that Roger and Scott started, it is so far from over. There are secrets in whale and dolphin sounds. There's complexity there. We're lonely now. But we might not be lonely forever. That story comes from our podcast, Undiscovered, and was reported back in 2018.

and he meant off and Ella Fetter were the producers and hosts, and it was edited by Christopher and Taliatta D. Peter Schmidt wrote the music. And that's about it for this week. If you missed any part of the program, you'd like to hear it again. Yes, subscribe to our podcasts. We're asking your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.