Zebra finches go wild! Experimental cultural evolution of birdsong
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Vocal learning in songbirds is guided by experience and experience-independent factors. Previously, lineages of zebra finches founded by isolate-reared tutors showed cultural evolution to wild-type song. This suggests that experience-independent biases affect song development even in the absence of wild-type song. We hypothesized that cultural evolution of song depends on both experience-independent biases and tutor songs available. We predicted that songs more distant from wild-type would take longer to culturally evolve toward wild-type features. We bred zebra finches in three groups of lineages in which offspring of each generation served as tutors for the next. Lineages were founded with males singing wild-type song, isolate song, or heterospecific song. The two experimental lineages exhibited rapid cultural evolution of song with many temporal and spectral features converging to wild-type within two generations. However the rate of change differed depending on song features measured, and took longer for lineages founded with heterospecific song.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it