You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice by Tom Vanderbilt

Author:Tom Vanderbilt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General, Psychology, Business & Economics, Social Science
ISBN: 9780307958242
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2016-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

ACCIDENTALLY FAMOUS: ON THE RANDOMNESS AND THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF TASTE

In a small patch of clearing where power lines snake through a forest in the Berkshires, a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts has been recording, over several decades, the songs of the chestnut-sided warbler, a small New World warbler with a jaunty yellow crown. The songs, as judged by Audubon’s Guide to North American Birds, are “rich and musical with an emphatic ending.” There are two general types of songs the birds sing: “accented” and “unaccented” (the former has a “loud and distinctive terminal downsweep syllable”; the latter does not). Accented songs are generally used to attract mates; indeed, male warblers, like husbands who “give up” on their appearance after courtship is concluded, largely eschew singing them once they have shacked up. Unaccented songs, meanwhile, are often deployed in male-on-male conflict.

Looking over the course of their warbler song recordings, the researchers found that the unaccented songs that seemed most popular with the warblers in 1988 were almost entirely gone by 1995, replaced by a whole new repertoire. Rather like the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the chestnut-sided warbler culture had in a rather short span moved on, musically, to a whole new set of “tastes.” What was going on? Why would novelty arise when the adaptive fitness of a species or an individual bird, the ability to pass on genes to the next generation, so often favors conformity in communication—singing the songs everyone knows, the way everyone knows them? Were male warblers engaging in impromptu song battles, like New York hip-hop DJs in the 1980s, trying to slay their opponent with their virtuosity, their clever turns of musical phrase?

Bruce Byers, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts and the lead researcher on the study, thinks there is something more prosaic at work: The birds are simply getting the songs wrong. “Individuals within a species vary in the precision with which they can imitate,” he told me. “Just like people.” And perfect imitation, he noted, “presumably has some costs. You have to maintain the brainpower necessary to do precise imitations. So unless there is some huge benefit to offset those costs, you expect some slack, some slight discrepancies in the copy, as compared to the model the birds imitate.” As with a game of telephone, as the songs get passed down the line, “these slight variations accumulate rapidly enough so that songs turn over completely within a decade or so.”

The accented, mate-attracting songs, by contrast, hardly changed at all. Byers suspects these are the songs where getting it right really counts. Females, as he has found, seem to prefer male birds who, like some avian Marvin Gaye, sang “more consistently and at higher pitch.” Having males singing the same songs makes it easier to tell who is doing it best; if you are a male (and you want your genes passed on), it makes sense spending the extra energy to really nail that song.

With the evolving, unaccented songs, it was not as if the birds were craving novelty or that some creative bird set out to invent a new style.

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