The Evolution of Hearing in the Mammals
The Evolution of Hearing in the Mammals
复制标题
哺乳动物听力的进化
DOI：
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发表时间：
1980
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
W. Stebbins
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
W. Stebbins
Of the many successful adaptations that characterize the living mammals and give them an advantage over ancestral forms, perhaps few are as distinctive as their sense of hearing. Although parallel developments have occurred in the living birds and in one or two of the modern reptilian orders, to some extent, in the mammals as a group, the diversity and complexity in auditory form and function, the range of hearing, and the discriminative acuity for the various parameters of acoustic signals surpasses that seen in other animals (Masterton, Heffner, and Ravizza 1969, Stebbins 1975, 1978). Clearly, in the course of mammalian evolution there have been important changes in other sensory systems such as olfaction and vision, but by comparison, the changes that have occurred in hearing have been perhaps the most dramatic. From premammalian ears, which probably functioned as substrate vibration detectors or, at best, receptors of low frequency aerial sound, have evolved such successful adaptations as the high frequency echoranging of the bats and cetacea, the almost uncanny sensitivity of the felids, and the discriminative acuity of the primates for minute changes in the amplitude and spectral composition of the acoustic waveform. It was these developments in the primates that made possible the effective resolution of one of the more complex of all periodic waveforms—human language.
