A bunch of individuals do the same thing because they learned from watching each other or somebody else. That's what we would call culture.

What I mean is, if you look at the behavior of an animal and ask, Well, why did it do that? and then consider the alternatives, those alternatives probably wouldn't be as successful at getting its genes around.

I never thought of that one, that linguistics could be driving cultural things. There are some thoughts that that does happen in humans, that languages have different characteristics and that influences in some ways how different groups behave, and I suppose it might in whales.

Religion's pretty pervasive in humans. And why it's pervasive in humans is debated a lot. There are indications of things that look like religion in other animals, like chimps doing rain dances, and that sort of thing. Actually, I say that, but there's that and not much else.

Culture is not usually one of the criterion for personhood, but it has been argued that culture is sort of a medium for a lot of these criteria, such as empathy, and so on.

I don't like to be dismissive of whales speaking possibilities. There is a pretty New Age-y, poorly thought set of ideas about this going around. I also think these animals benefit most from us staying out of their way. I think we learn the most by being as passive as we can, so those are my biases, and I'm sort of against it from that perspective.

Studying the behavior of large whales has been likened to astronomy. The observer glimpses his subjects, often at long range he cannot do experiments, and he must continually try to infer from data that are usually inadequate.