ArticleNature communications2018
Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Collective posterior inference from highly variable empirical replicates.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Experimental manipulation of ecological and cognitive conditions produces the entire conformity-diversity spectrum in a single species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- What imitating an iconic robot reveals on allospecific vocal imitation in parrots and starlings.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Cultural and morphological divergence of Darwin's cactus finches (Biological journal of the Linnean Society. Linnean Society of London · 2025Article
- Building Complexity From Simplicity: A Songbird's Vocal Repertoire Varies Among Populations Despite Similarity of Syllables.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Birds of a song sing together: adaptive choices in the use of shared vocalizations that indicate age.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The contribution of movement to social network structure and spreading dynamics under simple and complex transmission.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Frequency-dependence may moderate fitness costs linked to reduced bird song complexity.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- The association between liking, learning and creativity in music.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- BASSA: New software tool reveals hidden details in visualisation of low-frequency animal sounds.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Parental developmental experience affects vocal learning in offspring.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- callsync: An R package for alignment and analysis of multi-microphone animal recordings.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Conformity in mate choice, the overlooked social component of animal and human culture.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2023Review
- Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Polychotomous traits and evolution under conformity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Cultural diffusion dynamics depend on behavioural production rules.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
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 find that syllables are learned with an estimated error rate of 1.85% and with a conformist bias in learning. This bias is consistent with a simple mechanism of overproduction and selective attrition. Finally, we estimate that syllable types could frequently persist for more than 500 years. Our results demonstrate conformist bias in natural animal behaviour and show that this, along with moderately precise learning, may support traditions whose stability rivals those of humans.
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