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.

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.

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 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.

What I mean by it, and roughly what most biologists who talk about culture mean by it, is either behavior itself, or information that leads to behavior. Information that is picked up through social learning - so, from being with, watching, being taught by others. It's a way that individuals behave or get information about how they will behave that comes directly from the behavior of others.