对人和对其他动物来说，我们都倾向于认为文化是某种通过社会学习传播的东西。但文化多样性之某些方面的物种特性以及某一特定物种不同个体之间的差异都表明，文化的根源可能在于基因。
Fehér等人通过分析斑胸草雀的一个海岛群落中通过社会形式学到的鸟鸣的形成过程，对后一个问题进行了探讨。虽然这个群落最初的创始成员在发育过程中从未接受过鸣叫辅导，而且其叫声与野生型有显著不同，在仅仅经过三代或四代之后，辅导产生的叫声就会接近野生型的叫声。这些发现表明，物种特异性鸣叫文化可以从头形成，这与尼加拉瓜人手语的从头演化非常相似，该手语由马那瓜的聋儿自发形成，与口头语言在语法上具有相似性。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
Nature 459, 564-568 (28 May 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07994
De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch
Olga Fehér1, Haibin Wang2, Sigal Saar1, Partha P. Mitra2 & Ofer Tchernichovski1
1 Department of Biology, City College, City University of New York, New York 10031, USA
2 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA
Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints1, presumably of genetic origin. A celebrated, if contentious, example is whether a universal grammar constrains syntactic diversity in human languages2. Oscine songbirds exhibit song learning and provide biologically tractable models of culture: members of a species show individual variation in song3 and geographically separated groups have local song dialects4, 5. Different species exhibit distinct song cultures6, 7, suggestive of genetic constraints8, 9. Without such constraints, innovations and copying errors should cause unbounded variation over multiple generations or geographical distance, contrary to observations9. Here we report an experiment designed to determine whether wild-type song culture might emerge over multiple generations in an isolated colony founded by isolates, and, if so, how this might happen and what type of social environment is required10. Zebra finch isolates, unexposed to singing males during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory11 or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments: tutor–pupil pairs in sound-isolated chambers and an isolated semi-natural colony. In both settings, juveniles imitated the isolate tutors but changed certain characteristics of the songs. These alterations accumulated over learning generations. Consequently, songs evolved towards the wild-type in three to four generations. Thus, species-typical song culture can appear de novo. Our study has parallels with language change and evolution12, 13, 14. In analogy to models in quantitative genetics15, 16, we model song culture as a multigenerational phenotype partly encoded genetically in an isolate founding population, influenced by environmental variables and taking multiple generations to emerge.
