We have the same ability to learn language

This is what the researchers concluded after studying the genetic basis for imitating sounds. The similarities have nothing to do with evolutionary relationships.

There are a number of species on Earth that can produce sounds by hearing them, which is known as “vocal learning.” It is a special skill that ensures that animals are able not only to recognize complex and diverse sounds, but also to imitate them. Besides birds, only a few species are known to be able to do this. These include humans, dolphins, whales, seals, elephants and bats.

This is an amazing combination. After all, humans and birds are separated by about 300 million years of evolution. While the extent to which different birds learn vocally can vary greatly. While a parrot can also imitate sounds from other species, a zebra finch only imitates melodies from other species. Researchers from University of California So I decided to find out why one species can modify its voice based on what the animal hears, while another cannot.

artificial intelligence
They did this with the help of an artificial intelligence program that can identify fifty gene regulatory elements that are important for this type of proper learning. “In this way, we were able to find similarities between bats and humans, among other things, in the structural elements of the brain, its genetic content and even in the neural circuits responsible for vocal learning,” says researcher Michael Yartsev.

Egyptian fruit bat
It turns out that the Egyptian fruit bat in particular had interesting similarities to us. A specific part of this bat's brain contains connections very similar to those in the part of the human brain that controls speech. “The cell types that form these types of long-range connections in the brains of humans and bats are the same ones that we discovered based on genetic analysis as being most relevant to vocal learning,” says fellow researcher Andreas Pfenning. “So anatomy and genetics suggest that the same mechanism underlies this in both species.”

development?
But how can species that are so far apart from each other evolutionarily still have similar genetic mechanisms? And many closely related animals do not have this vocal learning ability? The researchers conclude that there must be “convergent evolution”: a process in which different species develop similar characteristics independently in response to similar environmental factors. You can also see this, for example, in animal wings. The wing structures of pterosaurs, bats, and birds are very similar, but the species do not descend from each other. In this case – where many species have evolved a way to learn sounds – the reason would be that multiple species apparently had a need for complex and flexible communication.

This discovery was made possible in part thanks to the use of artificial intelligence (AI). In this case, using an approach called machine learning Tissue Preservation Inference Toolkit (implicit). “New AI methods were needed to help find evolutionary signals in regulatory elements in hundreds of genomes,” says researcher Pfenning. “We are entering an exciting era in which artificial intelligence is improving our ability to trace human evolutionary history.”