{"id":87731,"date":"2019-02-14T12:06:06","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T20:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/are-whales-smarter-than-we-are"},"modified":"2019-02-14T12:06:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T20:06:06","slug":"are-whales-smarter-than-we-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/are-whales-smarter-than-we-are","title":{"rendered":"Are Whales Smarter Than We Are?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/logo.are-whales-smarter-than-we-are2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2008<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\u201cTruth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.\u201d Herman Melville.<\/p>\n<p>Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain\u2019s legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of cetacean jujitsu, drowned poor Ahab by towing him into the abyss by the harpoon rope tangled around Ahab\u2019s remaining leg. \u201cFrom Hell\u2019s heart I stab at thee!\u201d Gulp. We humans pride ourselves on our big brains. We never seem to tire of bragging about how our supreme intelligence empowers us to lord over all other animals on the planet. Yet the biological facts don\u2019t quite square with Homo sapiens\u2019 arrogance. The fact is, people do not have the largest brains on the planet, either in absolute size or in proportion to body size. Whales, not people, have the biggest brains of any animal on earth.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/news-blog\/are-whales-smarter-than-we-are\/\">https:\/\/blogs.scientificamerican.com\/news-blog\/are-whales-smarter-than-we-are\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2008 \u201cTruth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.\u201d Herman Melville. Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain\u2019s legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}