5 resultados para Creole dialects, Danish

em National Center for Biotechnology Information - NCBI


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In many song birds, males develop their songs as adults by imitating the songs of one or more tutors, memorized previously during a sensitive phase early in life. Previous work using two assays, the production of imitations by adult males and playback-induced calling by young birds during the sensitive phase for memorization, has shown that song birds can discriminate between their own and other species' songs. Herein I use both assays to show that male mountain white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha, must learn to sing but have a genetic predisposition to memorize and learn the songs of their own subspecies. Playback tests to young naive birds before they even begin to sing reveal that birds give begging calls more in response to oriantha song than to songs of another species. After 10 days of tutoring with songs of either their own or another subspecies, birds continue to give stronger call responses to songs of their own subspecies, irrespective of whether they were tutored with them, and are more discriminating in distinguishing between different dialects of their own subspecies. The memory processes that facilitate recognition and discrimination of own-subspecies' song may also mediate the preferential imitation of song of a bird's own subspecies. Such perceptual biases could constrain the direction and rate of cultural evolution of learned songs.

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In this paper we propose a method to estimate by maximum likelihood the divergence time between two populations, specifically designed for the analysis of nonrecurrent rare mutations. Given the rapidly growing amount of data, rare disease mutations affecting humans seem the most suitable candidates for this method. The estimator RD, and its conditional version RDc, were derived, assuming that the population dynamics of rare alleles can be described by using a birth–death process approximation and that each mutation arose before the split of a common ancestral population into the two diverging populations. The RD estimator seems more suitable for large sample sizes and few alleles, whose age can be approximated, whereas the RDc estimator appears preferable when this is not the case. When applied to three cystic fibrosis mutations, the estimator RD could not exclude a very recent time of divergence among three Mediterranean populations. On the other hand, the divergence time between these populations and the Danish population was estimated to be, on the average, 4,500 or 15,000 years, assuming or not a selective advantage for cystic fibrosis carriers, respectively. Confidence intervals are large, however, and can probably be reduced only by analyzing more alleles or loci.