Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lachlan RF
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6010409 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song.
Lachlan Robert F RF Ratmann Oliver O Nowicki Stephen S
Nature communications 20180620 1
Cultural traditions have been observed in a wide variety of animal species. It remains unclear, however, what is required for social learning to give rise to stable traditions: what level of precision and what learning strategies are required. We address these questions by fitting models of cultural evolution to learned bird song. We recorded 615 swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana) song repertoires, and compared syllable frequency distributions to the output of individual-based simulations. We f ...[more]
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