De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch.

ABSTRACT: Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints, presumably of genetic origin. A celebrated, if contentious, example is whether a universal grammar constrains syntactic diversity in human languages. Oscine songbirds exhibit song learning and provide biologically tractable models of culture: members of a species show individual variation in song and geographically separated groups have local song dialects. Different species exhibit distinct song cultures, suggestive of genetic constraints. Without such constraints, innovations and copying errors should cause unbounded variation over multiple generations or geographical distance, contrary to observations. Here we report an exper

SUBMITTER: Feher O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2693086 | biostudies-literature | 2009 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature