If the difference between music and noise is in the listener's genes, what would that say about the Baby Boomers and their parents, or their kids? Would the hippies have been more accurate than they could have known by calling themselves freaks?

Science has yet to take up such questions in a serious way, although there has been plenty of pseudo-science revolving around such cultural subjects. A lot of the latter has been government-funded Drug War hokum.

However, at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute people recently pondered "mountains, forests, rivers and calls, as affect frogs." It was a lecture by Dr. Adolfo Amezquita, a Colombian biologist, about his research on the sounds that the Hyla labialis and related South American make to find mates, mark their territories and otherwise communicate about the things that frogs like to discuss.

This lecture, unlike most of the Tuesday noon presentations at the Smithsonian's Tupper Auditorium in Ancon, was given in Spanish. Amezquita, who teaches at the University of the Andes and has his PhD from the University of Indiana, did most of his field work for in the mountains around Bogota, sometimes having to make last-minute changes in his research schedule due to the exigencies of warfare in and around the frogs' habitat.

Hyla labialis varies in size, color and the patterns of its markings according to its geographic habitat, and most especially according to the elevation at which it lives. Members of the species also vary as to the way that they deposit their eggs, the size of their eggs, the age of sexual maturity and the size at which tadpoles undergo metamorphosis to become adult frogs.

Along with these differences, the frogs differ in the calls they make. There are frog calls of different pitches, lengths, volumes, frequencies of repetition and calling times. Frog calls vary as to the season of the year, the amount of rainfall and the temperature outside.

It turns out that within a single species of frogs subgroups select one another for mating purposes on the basis of their calling characteristics. "Mismatch in communications," Amezquita pointed out, "can isolate a population."

The biologist believes that both genetic drift and natural selection have combined to create "geographic differentiation in signal features."

Hmmmmm --- where have we heard of THAT before? Don't people do that too? At our longitude, isn't Spanish the predominant language at 9°N, with mostly English spoken at 40°N? Isn't there a specific geographic area identified with a signal feature called "French," and another geographic area where the main signal feature is called "Japanese?"

Well, racists of all sorts will be eager to jump to unwarranted conclusions from this frog research and apply them their self-serving Social Darwinist models of human evolution, but Dr. Mezquita is too careful a scientist to indulge in that. Instead of ultimate answers to Life, The Universe and Everything, what his research has provoked in his mind are yet more questions.

Do frogs partition the acoustic space?

Do frogs have languages?

Might various types of frogs call differently than their neighbors, yet be able to understand different "language" calls?

Does color really matter when frogs are falling in love?

More research is underway on all of these subjects, including a massive study of the Epipedobates femoralis, a frog species that's found across the massive Amazon Basin in many variations. It's likely to be quite some time before this research determines whether a preference for Jimi Hendrix or the Beastie Boys is a matter of genetic mutation.