Hoffmann Bird Club November Meeting: Heather Williams, Ph.D. – The Cultural Evolution of Bird Songs

Monday, November 11 @ 7:00 PM, social time at 6:30 PM

Live and on Zoom (email for Zoom link)

HBC Monthly Meeting

• Berkshire Community College, Auditorium K-111
  • 1350 West St, Pittsfield, MA 01201
  • Visitor parking is located on the right when entering the campus near the traffic circle.
  • Enter at the ramp near the 4 flagpoles

With Special Guest, Heather Williams, Ph.D.

(William Dwight Whitney Professor of Biology at Williams College)

She will present…

“The Cultural Evolution of Bird Songs”

Heather Williams began her career intending to be a marine biologist, studying communication in coral reef fish in the Red Sea. However, the logistics of doing a Ph.D. thesis that involved lab work with these fish in New York City were difficult, and so she switched to studying bird songs – a good choice!

Her early work, including the research done after she joined Williams College, focused on how auditory and motor circuits worked together during song learning, and how the nervous system turns that learning on and off. Then the siren call of field work overtook her, and now her earlier work informs her studies with wild populations, tracking song learning over the long term and how it influences changes in the songs in succeeding generations of male Savannah sparrows – who complete learning of a single song during their first year, but can learn those songs from their fathers and other older birds, as well as from birds their own age. Over the long term, new variations in the song arise, are copied, and may (or may not) be adopted by an entire breeding population – resulting in cultural evolution. Her work explores how the mechanisms that drive Darwinian evolution of genes, which are only passed down from parents, are both similar to and different from the mechanisms that result in cultural evolution of learned songs.

For further info about Dr. Williams, and her published works, see:

https://biology.williams.edu/profile/hwilliam/