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.

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.

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.

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.

Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in quite a few respects, they do, and that can help us, perhaps, to better understand our own culture. We look at the ways humans are similar to other animals, and at the ways they differ, rather than just saying, "We have culture and you don't."

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.

The actual communicative value of what we say is usually quite small. I've lived for times in small, isolated fishing villages, where everyone knows everyone each other and everyone knows what's going on and everyone's watched the same TV programs and, really, there's not a whole lot of new information to convey. But there's still a lot of talking. What's said doesn't seem to matter; that you say it, and who you say it to, and how you say it is what matters.