Philip Hoare Answers a Book Question

February 12, 2010, 7:00 am
Stray Questions for: Philip Hoare
By BLAKE WILSON
From the New York Times
A Blog About Books

Excerpt:

"I never tire of telling people to read Hal Whitehead’s “Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean.” It’s the most astounding work. Whitehead is a Cambridge-educated statistician who, like me, became fascinated by whales. He has spent the past three decades studying them, from Sri Lanka to the Galapagos and the Caribbean. He now works at Dalhousie, Nova Scotia. His conclusions on sperm whale culture are breathtaking. These cetaceans possess the largest brain of any animal — and their neo-cortexes are so highly developed that they are believed to be capable of tool use, complex communication, social structures and abstract thought. Whitehead even hypothesizes that sperm whales may have developed their own ideas of religion. When I read that — in the final pages of a rigorously researched book, filled with scientific data — I nearly fell out of bed."

Philip Hoare’s new book, “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea,” has just been published.