This is somewhat unrelated, and for that, I apologize, but I find it truly fascinating, and I believe you will too.

Zebra finches are a song bird that have become a popular model organism for behavioral research. They have a very stereotypical pattern for song learning: at about 70 days after hatching, the baby male song bird starts to listen to his father's song, copy it, practice it, and ultimately learn it. Female birds do not have a courtship song to learn.

Interestingly, if the baby male bird does not learn their father's song, they end up just kind of screeching, and never singing a song. This, in nature, makes them unable to court a female.

But in the lab, this research group did an experiment, where they took these screeching males, let them grow to adulthood, then teach their child as best as they can. The child, wanting to learn a song, takes what it can from the father. After 4 generations of this, the group was able to get de novo song production from these birds.

Unbelievable!

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/full/nature07994.html

This is somewhat unrelated, and for that, I apologize, but I find it truly fascinating, and I believe you will too.

Zebra finches are a song bird that have become a popular model organism for behavioral research. They have a very stereotypical pattern for song learning: at about 70 days after hatching, the baby male song bird starts to listen to his father's song, copy it, practice it, and ultimately learn it. Female birds do not have a courtship song to learn.

Interestingly, if the baby male bird does not learn their father's song, they end up just kind of screeching, and never singing a song. This, in nature, makes them unable to court a female.

But in the lab, this research group did an experiment, where they took these screeching males, let them grow to adulthood, then teach their child as best as they can. The child, wanting to learn a song, takes what it can from the father. After 4 generations of this, the group was able to get de novo song production from these birds.

Unbelievable!

De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch - Fehér et al. - Nature, 2009