Dr. Erich Jarvis – May 2027

7:00 pm, Tuesday, May 11, 2027
Linder Theater, American Museum of Natural History
Enter via the West 77th Street Entrance, between Central Park West and Columbus Ave., New York City
Free and open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 pm.

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The Neuroscience of Language in Birds 

Any birder who has listened to a mockingbird splice together borrowed phrases, or watched a young cardinal try to copy its father’s song, has witnessed something remarkable: for some species, birdsong isn’t instinct alone. It is learned, through brain wiring that closely resembles the wiring enabling human speech. Neuroscientist Erich Jarvis will explain that resemblance, drawing on his studies in birds and humans on vocal learning: the ability to hear a novel sound and reshape one’s vocal output to match it. Oscine songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds have this capacity; suboscine flycatchers and pigeons don’t, no matter how much song they hear. Vocal-learning birds and humans diverged from a common ancestor over 300 million years ago, yet arrived independently at the same solution: a direct nerve pathway from brain to vocal muscles, and shared genetic switches, like FOXP2 and PLXNA1, flipping on in both. Jarvis will illuminate this convergent evolution. He will also talk about how our understanding of bird-brain science and translations to humans was reshaped by a 2005 relabeling of avian brain regions that he helped lead.

Dr. Erich D. Jarvis earned his PhD at The Rockefeller University in 1995 for research on genes linked to vocalization in canaries. He returned to Rockefeller University in 1916 as a tenured professor heading the new Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language. Dr. Jarvis investigates vocal learning in songbirds and other animals as a model for understanding spoken language in humans. In recent years, Dr. Jarvis’s interest in songbird learning has expanded into the parallel pursuit of genomics. As co-leader of an avian genomics consortium consisting of more than 200 scientists in 20 countries, he oversaw the sequencing of genomes from representative species of every avian order—48 genomes in all. Dr. Jarvis has also helped organize an international Vertebrate Genomes Project, formed with the goal of assembling high-quality genomes for all 70,000 vertebrate species on Earth. An Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2008, Dr. Jarvis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award and an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Find more at https://www.jarvislab.net/ and https://vertebrategenomesproject.org/