Evolution of hearing in vertebrates: the inner ears and processing

This paper considers aspects or the evolution of the vertebrate auditory sy stem from an 'ichthyocentric' perspective. It is argued that all vertebrate auditory systems are required to do certain basic tasks including acoustic feature discrimination, sound source localization, frequency analysis, and auditory scene analysis, among others. These sorts of capabilities arose v ery early in the evolution of the vertebrates and have been modified by sel ection in different species. In some cases the same structures have been in volved in detection and analysis throughout the vertebrates, while in other cases the mechanism by which the same type of analysis takes place may hav e changed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.