Neuroscience of birdsong: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, H Philip Zeigler and Peter Marler
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259
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10.1186/1479-7364-4-2-143
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143
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5
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Book review
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1
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RegistrationDate : 2009–12–1 OnlineDate
: 2009–12–1
Henry Stewart Publications2009
402464422
Michael Stumpf,Aff1
Corresponding Affiliation: Aff1
Aff1 Imperial College London, UK
The title Neuroscience of Birdsong hardly does justice to the contents of this treasure of a book. While birdsong has been studied extensively in the context of behavioural ecology and evolution, the physiological, genetic and molecular aspects have been studied less widely. Birdwatching (or 'twitching') has played an important role in the youth of many eminent ecologists or evolutionary biologists, [1] and this may have played a small part in the emphasis that has been placed on the role of birdsong in behavioural ecology. Arch-twitchers, if they have not seen a bird but have only heard it, will often count it towards their tally of birds 'experienced'. But, just as male birds tend to be more flamboyantly coloured, it tends to be the males who do all the singing - or so I thought, prior to reading the chapters in this wonderfully edited book. Birdsong has many more facets than perhaps conventionally acknowledged: the repertoire of songbirds depends on a multitude of factors which feed back onto the birds' brain structure. These factors include breeding patterns and social structures of birds, territoriality, dependence on environmental cues such as seasonality outside of the tropics, and much more complicated combinations of factors inside tropical latitudes. In many of the best-studied species, typically from temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, singing is closely related to sexual dimorphism, where males sing in order to attract females or to mark their territory. This dimorphism is, as many articles amply demonstrate, reflected in the neuronal architecture of the bird brain. In the best-studied systems, where the Northern Hemisphere
species are joined by the Australian zebra finch, the central auditory system in the male birds' brains is significantly larger than that of the females of the species. It is in the wider discussion of this and related points where the book really scores highly, and this is why it merits the attention of a wider audience. One of the main reasons why the analysis of birdsong is interesting lies in the perceived or actual relationships to human language. Birdsong, like human language, is acquired from role models; but nature, in addition to nurture, also plays its part. Moreover, as discussed widely throughout the chapters, some of the neuronal circuitry shows strong similarity to the auditory and language-processing regions in the human brain. In other chapters, this level of physiological homology [2] is extended to the genetic level, in a discussion of the relative role which the gene Foxp2 appears to play both in human lan
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