Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds
Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds
All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf's law.
Zipf's Law is far more universal than human language, It is almost appears naturally if we start with a few simple conditions - consider a finite total group, and a initial distribution, where different elements have different wights and growth rates of elements is proportional to weights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
Still kind of interesting that those conditions are satisfied here, and (according to the article) it does indeed suggest that the song is learned rather than genetic. I wonder if there are studies for other animals, e.g. ones for which we know that their communications are passed down genetically.