A 5-year-old boy speaks his first words; the blue whale sings more deeply (The most beautiful gift of all: language)
Okay, so, today, Robert Mugabe announced that only God could remove him from power – while his tortured subjects just pray for any kind of deliverance. That in itself should tell you enough about the existence of an all-loving and all-seeing God. You know what though, I’ve had it with both Gods and monsters for now, so I’m not going to waste more than this one paragraph on them today. Today’s column is all about the celebration of life – and what makes intelligent life both bearable and, at times, even joyous: language.
For the first story we leave the sea where it all began, move through Africa where man first descended from those trees and end our brief journey up in London, where something marvellous finally happened for Jamie Jenkins and his family:
The parents of a five-year-old boy who feared they would never hear him talk have spoken of their joy after he uttered his first words. Jamie Jenkins, who was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a condition that affects the ability to communicate, broke his silence with the words ‘mumma’ and ‘purple’.
His mother and his father David Jenkins recently took him to the National Light and Sound Therapy Centre in London, where he underwent twice daily light and sound therapy sessions. The therapy involved listening to music through headphones while the light therapy exposed him to different colours from a light box.
Language is one of those truly miraculous gifts from nature. On its most primitive levels it functions to let one member of a tribe (or species) inform the others of the location of food, and of approaching danger, and of sexual intent. Birds do this; bees do this; and so do humans – but we’ve been given the opportunity to develop the language (and with it our brains) so that we can tell our campfire stories about monsters and Gods, dragons and princes, and sing our songs that tell of love, and of beauty, and of loss. In this, we are truly blessed.
We are not the only ones who were touched like this. We share this earth with a few other species that have developed language to a point where function and art and beauty meet. So, now, let’s say goodbye to Jamie Jenkins and his family and wish them God’s or Darwin’s speed on this most miraculous of journeys and turn our eyes to one of the most beautiful creatures on this planet – and for that we don’t need Africa’s trees and various other, rugged features: for this we can stay in the sea, where all began, and where some things still continue, despite the wastefulness and ugly husbandry of man:
The haunting song of the world’s biggest animal, the blue whale, is getting deeper, researchers have discovered. Underwater recordings of the giant endangered mammals have revealed that the tone of their rhythmic pulses and moans has become steadily lower as their population have slowly recovered after nearly being wiped out by whaling. Before large-scale hunting, the global blue whale population was thought to have been around 200,000 animals, but numbers fell to just a few hundred by the 1960s when a hunting ban was introduced. The population has since recovered to around 4,500 animals.
Professor John Hildebrand, a blue whale expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, has used recordings of blue whales since the 1960s to track the changes in their songs. He said: “It takes a conscious decision to make the calls deeper, so it is a reflection of what is going on in the population. These animals have a finite lung capacity, so their songs are a trade off between frequency and volume. They can either make the song really loud or really deep. As their numbers have slowly increased after the devastation caused by whaling, they are having to communicate over smaller distances so their songs don’t need to be as loud and they can make them deeper.”
Like Jamie Jenkins, the whale population has still a long way ago till it can sing with all the might and glory of its predecessors – but here’s to hope.
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