ABSTRACT
The goal was to reveal the developmental ”blueprint” for vocal ontogeny, the syntax or acoustic structure present in the absence of exposure to conspecifics. The ethologists' fears were, in part, an understandable reaction to behaviorism's quite grandiose claims that animals could learn all sorts of strange things by means of conditioning. In the hands of psychologists, learning was accepted as a superordinate category, a tool of general use in many behavioral domains. Ethologists, on the other hand, preferred to think of learning as simply another type of adaptation such as nest building. The seemingly superior function of isolate song was also puzzling, as cowbirds are not acoustically deprived during song development but live in large flocks. The growing use of playback techniques to learn about song function also mitigated against further investment in looking at the behavior of socially and acoustically naive birds.
