All right, let me give you an interesting example
that I've been studying recently. This comes from the
work of a man named Kazuo Okanoya in Chiba University.
He was looking at birdsong and the control
of birdsong in the brains of these birds. [Referring to
slide] Here we see a domesticated species called the
Bengalese Finch and a feral species. He recently found
the ancestor to this domesticated species. The species
has been domesticated for over 250 years, domesticated
for its coloration. It does not have a very pretty
song: chirps and clicks and that sort of thing. But he
wanted to study its song because it was a very easily
bred bird and it did have a song of some interest.
A very interesting phenomenon came up that
caused us to argue for a while and have to go out and
chase down the feral cousin, and then to figure out
what's happening, because here's what we found: The
domesticated species was fun to study because it had
a complicated song. The song had lots of different elements;
it had a lot of variability over time; there was
a lot of learning in it. However, the feral cousin had
a very stereotypic song. The species that it came from
had a song that was very limited and, in fact, the feral
species does not learn its song. There's a slight amount
of learning, but it's pretty minor; whereas the domesticated
species had a tremendous amount of learning
going on. Kazuo Okanoya was initially convinced
that, to some extent, there must be some unconscious
breeding for song going on in this process, or that
there might be some wonderful linkage between coloration
and song. It's not impossible and that's still a
hypothesis we haven't falsified.