Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I don't

need to point out the obvious here, but I am talking to you right now. You are listening.

We are engaging in a communication act mediated by speech, by vocalizations. This is something

that human beings can do. We can talk to each other. We have the power of language. So,

where did that come from? Is it common in the animal kingdom? Is it common in other species?

No. Well, yes and no. And this is what we're going to get into in today's podcast. Eric

Jarvis is a leading scientist. He's at Rockefeller University who studies the origins of language

and vocal learning and how they arise not only in human beings, but in other species, especially

in birds. Birds have a several of the other species where vocal learning, the ability to

learn new sounds, is a common trait. And you might think that, well, you know, I talked

to my dog and my cat, you know, you can give instructions to horses or elephants or whatever,

but that's not quite language. And the interesting distinction is that dogs and cats can bark

and meow, but they can't learn new sounds. Those sounds that they have to communicate

with, they're born with more or less. I mean, maybe they learn to meow, but they always

had the ability to do it, right? And so it's a very small number of species that actually

has the ability to learn new sounds and then put them to use in communicating with each

other. As we'll go through, I'm not going to give away all the fun things that happen

in the podcast, but in addition to a few mammal species, there's several species of birds.

You know about parrots, parakeets, hummingbirds also and so forth have this ability to learn

new sounds. So one question is, you know, why is this ability so rare? It seems kind

of useful, right? And then why do we human beings in particular put it to use in the way

that we do? You know, parakeets don't make grammatically complicated sentences in the

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