14 DAY TRIAL // While this is obvious, birds and humans took a very different evolutionary path a few million years ago. But what's weird is that studying bird genetics can even now yield insight into our very own genetic traits. This is exactly what a group of researchers from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, the US, did, in their investigations of a group of finches. Their study yielded unexpected and very surprising results, which may shed some light on how we, as a society, came to be.
It's common knowledge that male finches get their beautiful mating songs from their fathers and uncles, when they are in the wild. But this knowledge brings about a philosophical question that has no answer, a query similar to the egg-and-chicken dilemma. If babies learn from fathers, who did the fathers learn from? That is to say, who taught the first males of the species? In an attempt to understand this mystery, the researchers hypothesized that the birds had this type of mating behavior inscribed in their genes, and set out to demonstrate this.
They created soundproof enclosures, in which they bred a number of finches, deprived of their fathers' and uncles' musical influences. Naturally, the songs they developed were very wrong, as far as beats and the rise or fall of pitch went. These are the main things that attract females to a male, and so these males wouldn't have stood a chance to procreate in the wild. The experiment was allowed to go on, and the birds mated and brought forth offspring.
Surprisingly, their offspring seemed to sing a lot better than their fathers, although not even close to the kind of music that finches created in the wild. In the end, after the fourth generation of birds bred in soundproof enclosures, the offspring began to sing in a manner that was very similar, and at times almost identical, to the songs that finches sang after learning from their fathers. The find amazed scientists – in just four generations, the influence of genes made its presence felt with a very high intensity.
“It all happened so fast, and there was so little difference between the colony and in the one-to-one tutoring environment. So the process is pretty much hardwired. And the interesting thing was also that they could only get so close in a single generation, so the three to four generations were necessary for the phenotype to emerge,” City College of New York expert Olga Feher, who was also the lead author of a new study detailing the finds, explained. The paper appears in the May 3rd online edition of the journal Nature, Wired reports.
“Social learning is shared between the two, and songbirds are a well-understood and experimentally tractable system. These biologically-grounded studies will lead us beyond the tired ‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘biology versus culture’ dichotomies, which dominate the social sciences today,” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory expert Partha Mitra concluded.