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.

Quite a lot of what we normally think of as human culture doesn't fit some definition. What are the values behind cuisine, which is a form of human culture? Does it have deep values? I don't know - I would say not. But maybe I'm not a foodie.

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.

We believe we're seeing, in other animals, a process, or an attribute, that isn't fundamentally different from what we see in humans, so it seems to us to be spurious to call them different things. Now there are aspects of human culture that we don't find in animals, and that's really interesting, but there are also probably aspects of animal cultures that we don't find in humans, and that's really interesting.

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.

I was very lucky. I was just finishing my PhD at Cambridge in 1981. This opportunity came up because whaling was drawing to an end. There was the prospect of a moratorium, and one of the arguments that was brought up, especially by Japanese whalers, was that, if we didn't have whaling, we would know nothing of whales. All the science depends on having dead animals, they argued, so that's one of the benefits of the whaling industry.

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."