ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Global cultural evolutionary model of humpback whale song.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Emergence of a Universal Rhythmic Feature: Simple Models Can Produce Categorical Rhythms.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Third-party imitation is not restricted to humans.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Culture and conservation in baleen whales.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Animal culture: conservation in a changing world.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Humpback whale song complexity and evolution on a northwestern Pacific breeding ground: Okinawa, Japan.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Patterns of paternity: insights into mating competition and gene flow in a recovering population of humpback whales.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Norm reinforcement, not conformity or environmental factors, is predicted to sustain cultural variation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Chimpanzees communicate to coordinate a cultural practice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Humpback whale song revolutions continue to spread from the central into the eastern South Pacific.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Song complexity is maintained during inter-population cultural transmission of humpback whale songs.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- When does cultural evolution become cumulative culture? A case study of humpback whale song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Vocal learning in animals and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Humpback whale song is an extraordinary example of vocal cultural behaviour. In northern populations, the complex songs show long-lasting traditions that slowly evolve, while in the South Pacific, periodic revolutions occur when songs are adopted from neighbouring populations and rapidly spread. In this species, vocal learning cannot be studied in the laboratory, learning is instead inferred from the songs' complexity and patterns of transmission. Here, we used individual-based cultural evolutionary simulations of the entire Southern and Northern Hemisphere humpback whale populations to formalize this process of inference. We modelled processes of song mutation and patterns of contact among populations and compared our model with patterns of song theme sharing measured in South Pacific populations. Low levels of mutation in combination with rare population interactions were sufficient to closely fit the pattern of diversity in the South Pacific, including the distinctive pattern of west-to-east revolutions. Interestingly, the same learning parameters that gave rise to revolutions in the Southern Hemisphere simulations gave rise to evolutionary patterns of cultural evolution in the Northern Hemisphere populations. Our study demonstrates how cultural evolutionary approaches can be used to make inferences about the learning processes underlying cultural transmission and how they might generate emergent population-level processes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vocal learning in animals and humans'.
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