Having once again come to
Having once again come to the end of an exhausting couple of weeks’ worth of declaiming loudly, I’ve been thinking about cetacean religion. That’s because I wrote the phrase “human religious thought” a couple of days ago, which prompted me to think about other kinds of religious thought. I believe that whales and their relatives are the best candidates for such thought. They’re social. They’ve got big brains: the average adult sperm whale brain weighs 20 pounds. Their smaller dolphin cousins’ weigh about 3.75 pounds. For comparison, human brains weigh about 3 pounds. Not that brain size necessarily means anything. But I’ve noticed that the extra weight in dolphin brains is all in the in good, smart-making, folded-up cerebrum. More folds means more neurons packed into the skull, and the hemispheres of a dolphin's brain are much more densely folded than ours.
