ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in bird song.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Geographic and genetic factors shape acoustic divergence and dialect-like variation in communication calls in the greater horseshoe bats.Zoological research · 2026Article
- Cultural and morphological divergence of Darwin's cactus finches (Biological journal of the Linnean Society. Linnean Society of London · 2025Article
- DuSAFNet: A Multi-Path Feature Fusion and Spectral-Temporal Attention-Based Model for Bird Audio Classification.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Conserving avian vocal culture.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
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- 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
- Thrush nightingales adjust the peak frequency and structure of their songs in response to different types of experimental noise.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The association between liking, learning and creativity in music.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sex differences in the impact of social relationships on individual vocal signatures in grey mouse lemurs (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Vocal convergence and social proximity shape the calls of the most basal Passeriformes, New Zealand Wrens.Communications biology · 2024Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Humpback whale song revolutions continue to spread from the central into the eastern South Pacific.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- The Neurobiology of Behavior and Its Applicability for Animal Welfare: A Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Complex foraging behaviours in wild birds emerge from social learning and recombination of components.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Collective minds: social network topology shapes collective cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- 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
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Abstract
In studies of cumulative cultural evolution in non-human animals, the focus is most often on incremental changes that increase the efficacy of an existing form of socially learned behaviour, such as the refinement of migratory pathways. In this paper, we compare the songs of different species to describe patterns of evolution in the acoustic structure of bird songs, and explore the question of what building blocks might underlie cumulative cultural evolution of bird song using a comparative approach. We suggest that three steps occurred: first, imitation of independent sounds, or notes, via social learning; second, the formation of categories of note types; and third, assembling note types into sequences with defined structures. Simple sequences can then be repeated to form simple songs or concatenated with other sequences to form segmented songs, increasing complexity. Variant forms of both the notes and the sequencing rules may then arise due to copy errors and innovation. Some variants may become established in the population because of learning biases or selection, increasing signal efficiency, or because of cultural drift. Cumulative cultural evolution of bird songs thus arises from cognitive processes such as vocal imitation, categorization during memorization and learning biases applied to basic acoustic building blocks. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.
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