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 hyp….

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 sa….

Psychologists would say that the only two important forms of social learning are imitation and teaching, and they will spend time trying to figure ou….

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 a….

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 ….

It's kind of ironic that when you look at the evidence of intelligence and so on, a lot of it is anecdotal. A lot of it is, "Well, we saw this dolphi….

The real controversy comes with anthropologists - not all, but some - who see themselves as studying culture, and they then see culture from the pers….

Conversation with animals could happen, but I think it would be easier for it to happen with creatures we share a bit more with - those that have bee….

I never thought of that one, that linguistics could be driving cultural things. There are some thoughts that that does happen in humans, that languag….

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 behavi….

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 ….

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 c….

Humans are particularly interesting; our culture is incredible, there's no doubt about that. In many respects, no other species matches ours. But in ….

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 ….

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, ….

I don't think in biology it's very controversial at all. Whether certain behavior is culture or is not culture is argued. I think virtually all biolo….

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 ….

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 pro….

Studying the behavior of large whales has been likened to astronomy. The observer glimpses his subjects, often at long range; he cannot do experiment….

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….

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..