All animals exhibit some form of communication, from the primitive hiss of a lizard to the complex gestures natural to chimps or the songs shared by whales.

But human language does seem exceptional, a vast and discrete cognitive leap.

Yet recent research is finding surprising neurological connections between our expressive speech

and the types of communication innate to other animals, giving us new ideas about the biological

and developmental origins

of language.

I'm Janelle Levin, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine, where I take

turns at the mic with my co-host, Steve Strogatz, exploring the biggest questions in math

and science today.

In this episode, we speak with neuroscientist

Eric Jarvis about the evolution of language and the search for answers in unexpected places,

like the Songs of Birds. Eric is a professor at the Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes

Medical Institute investigator. At Rockefeller, he directs the field research

center of ethology and ecology. He also directs the Neurogenetics Lab of Language and co-directs

the vertebrate genome lab, where he studies song learning birds and other species to gain insight

into the mechanisms underlying language and vocal learning.

Eric, we're so glad to have you here with us today.

Well, thank you very much, and thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Yes, we have the pleasure of actually being in person today, which is nice.

So I want to start with what we're actually doing here, which is using language and what our audience is doing, which is listening to words.

I guess the first question is, is language built in biologically, even genetically?

And also, is it uniquely human?

...