Over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin wrote, with some astonishment, that a range of animals appeared to have “nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have”.
The paper is the result of a study by Logan S James, an animal communications research associate at University of Texas, Austin, alongside researchers from the universities of Melbourne, Auckland, Montreal, and Yale. The task was simple: As mating calls were presented in pairs (each pair from the same species of frog, bird, cricket, fruitfly, singing mouse, etc), participants had to pick the one they liked more. Researchers already knew which sound the species preferred, based on previous studies. For instance, among tungara frogs, females prefer a more elaborate mating call, with added flourishes from acoustic whines and chucks. Humans picked such versions over simpler ones too. Across species, both animals and humans also appeared to prefer calls with acoustic flourishes such as trills, clicks and chucks. Meanwhile, isn’t it intriguing to think that, when a bird starts trilling in a forest, more than one species across the ecosystem could be pausing to listen?
To test Darwin’s idea, James and the team built a gamified online experiment played by over 4,000 participants. Now, across the dataset, James’s study found that humans tended to agree with the species in question, choosing the same variant of a mating call as the animals did about 54% of the time. Because of similarities in the basic building blocks (perhaps the circuitry or cells or both, among other factors) that make up these systems, for now, one theory is that, despite the enormous diversity of life on Earth, there might be certain similarities in how various species process certain sensory information —.
