ReviewFrontiers in psychology2020
Cultural Transmission, Evolution, and Revolution in Vocal Displays: Insights From Bird and Whale Song.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation.Biologia futura · 2026Review
- Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong.Science advances · 2026Article
- Genetic Composition Is Unrelated to Song Content in a Wild Passerine.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- 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
- Social learning and culture in birds: emerging patterns and relevance to conservation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Culture and conservation in baleen whales.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Geographical distribution of two acoustic fin whale (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Humpback whale song complexity and evolution on a northwestern Pacific breeding ground: Okinawa, Japan.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Frequency-dependence may moderate fitness costs linked to reduced bird song complexity.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Sperm whale clans and human societies.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Spatial and temporal variability of the acoustic repertoire of Antarctic minke whales (Balaenoptera bonaerensis) in the Weddell Sea.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Biased cultural transmission of a social custom in chimpanzees.Science advances · 2023Article
- Chimpanzees communicate to coordinate a cultural practice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cognitive control of song production by humpback whales.Animal cognition · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Culture, defined as shared behavior or information within a community acquired through some form of social learning from conspecifics, is now suggested to act as a second inheritance system. Cultural processes are important in a wide variety of vertebrate species. Birdsong provides a classic example of cultural processes: cultural transmission, where changes in a shared song are learned from surrounding conspecifics, and cultural evolution, where the patterns of songs change through time. This form of cultural transmission of information has features that are different in speed and form from genetic transmission. More recently, culture, vocal traditions, and an extreme form of song evolution have been documented in cetaceans. Humpback whale song "revolutions," where the single population-wide shared song type is rapidly replaced by a new, novel song type introduced from a neighboring population, represents an extraordinary example of ocean basin-wide cultural transmission rivaled in its geographic extent only by humans. In this review, we examine the cultural evolutions and revolutions present in some birdsong and whale song, respectively. By taking a comparative approach to these cultural processes, we review the existing evidence to understand the similarities and differences for their patterns of expression and the underlying drivers, including anthropogenic influences, which may shape them. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the role of innovation vs. production errors in song evolution, the fitness information present in song, and how human-induced changes in population sizes, trajectories, and migratory connections facilitating cultural transmission may be driving song revolutions.
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