ganz real
hallo!
wenn man mal sehen will wie es real läuft:
DENVER, CO - As the late novelist Joseph Conrad once suggested, people may
indeed have more in common with vocal-learning birds like songbirds and
parrots than we have previously assumed.
In songbirds capable of vocal learning, or imitating the sounds they hear,
new findings reveal a highly specialized pattern in the genetic expression
of certain brain receptors. These same receptors for the neurotransmitter,
glutamate, are also found in mammals, neurobiologist Erich D. Jarvis noted
during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS).
If further research shows the same specialized receptor pattern in people,
the research may help pinpoint the brain’s precise language centers-a first
step toward better understanding language loss associated with strokes,
lesions or head injuries. The work, by Jarvis, his student and first author
Kazuhiro Wada at Duke University and colleagues Hironobu Sakaguchi and
Masatoshi Hagiwara in Japan, is now pending review by the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
„Although it might seem far fetched, I would not be surprised if these
ancient receptors could someday help us identify the entire system of brain
regions for vocal learning and language in humans in a way that hasn’t been
done before,“ said Jarvis, an assistant professor in Duke’s Department of
Neurobiology.
Like a modern-day Dr. Doolittle, Jarvis-winner of the prestigious Alan T.
Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation’s highest honor for a young
scientist or engineer-seeks to understand animal „language.“ He’s
investigating what structures and molecular events in the brain give six
groups of animals a capacity for vocal learning. Imitating the sounds we
hear is a rare trait, shared only by certain birds (parrots, songbirds and
hummingbirds) and a few mammals (bats, cetaceans in the whale/dolphin family
and humans).
As he studies the neural mechanisms behind vocal learning, Jarvis is also
pursuing a key question in evolutionary biology: Did the trait of vocal
learning emerge independently in all six vocal-learning groups within the
past 65 million years, as a now-dominant theory suggests? Or, did all vocal
learners share a common ancestor with the trait, but then diverge as a
result of subsequent, independent mass extinctions of vocal learning among
various animals, including non-human primates? Though this question remains
a mystery for now, Jarvis’ latest work suggests that the evolution of vocal
learning was accompanied by divergent, specialized expression of an ancient
gene family in different vocal learning animals. Further, the diversity of
expression seems to depend on the complexity of the animal’s vocal syntax.
„Whether independent or dependent from a common ancestor, diversity of
neurotransmitter receptors in their vocal systems is probably not an
evolutionary cause of vocal learning, but a consequence of it, as diverse
species-specific specializations can be assumed recent and ongoing
evolution,“ Jarvis, Wada and colleagues wrote in their pending PNAS paper.
Moreover, they added: „With diverse specialization as a rule, it is not too
far a stretch to suggest that vocal-learning mammals, including humans, also
evolved diverse specialized glutamate receptor expression in vocal areas of
their cerebrums and that these are related in part to vocal syntax
complexity.“
Jarvis received his doctoral degree from The Rockefeller University in 1995.
He was one of 52 African American men out of more than 4,300 biologists to
receive a Ph.D. in the United States that year. His own pathway to success
was inspired by his mother, a woman with an ambitious spirit, and his late
father, a talented man who struggled with schizophrenia and periodic
homelessness while Erich was a child in New York City’s Harlem community.
His father’s eclectic interests and appreciation for the natural world
helped to shape Erich’s unique, interdisciplinary approach to his research,
making him-as former NSF Director Rita Colwell once said-„truly a gem“ and
„the epitome of the modern scientist, crossing between disciplines and
ideas.“
und das dauert „nur“ ein paar jahrzehnte bis man zurechtkommt.
die wahrscheinlichste „lösung“ ist ein missverständniss nach dem anderen und daraus resultierend krieg.
tschüss
matthias