Convergent evolution in whale and human vocal cultures: The complex songs of humpback whales conform to fundamental laws of language

Culture pervades the lives of numerous animal species, in a great diversity of forms (1), but the songs of the humpback whale are among animal culture’s most extraordinary manifestations. Sung only by males, the songs penetrate the ocean for many miles and are suspected to attract females for mating through their musical complexity. Year by year, the songs may become more complex and perhaps more alluring to females. However, in the southwestern Pacific, a totally new song emerges every few years that is adopted across the ocean (2). The rapidity with which new songs and variations are copied demonstrates that they are culturally transmitted, but the evolutionary forces that shape the complex song structures over time have remained mysterious. On page 649 of this issue, Arnon et al. (3) report that fundamental laws identified in quantitative linguistics and in the culturally evolved learnability of human languages apply to whale song.