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.

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.

When I'm out in the ocean and I watch a seabird, I think, "Oh, I probably I know what that seabird is doing" - and I don't study seabirds. And the same for the turtles and on and on. But with the whales, a lot of the time, I have no idea what they're doing, and they're the ones I study.

But one thing that seems pretty clear when we look at human religion is that it's highly tied in with human culture. So if, as seems to be the case, culture's governing a lot of what whales do, it's perhaps not an unreasonable hypothesis to think that it's got elements of...what I guess you'd call the supernatural.

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.

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.

Whales are cultural animals, and we're cultural animals, so although we shouldn't expect whales to do what we do, it doesn't seem unreasonable to hypothesize that we might share some of these things.