Erich Jarvis
Appearances
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
What makes a bird a bird? What makes a mammal a mammal? What makes a fish a fish? With all these species sequenced, we will be able to dig in and find those things that make each lineage different from another. And Eric says there's another reason. There's so many species that are on the verge of extinction that there isn't time to do much.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
We can capture their genetic data before they go extinct or even capture them to help save the population from going extinct. And so this is a moral reason for me to work on such a project and to be a chair of it.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
So I was always interested in genetics in general and the genetics of complex behaviors. And when I started requiring genetic data from multiple species, I was depending on other scientists who are genome experts to produce that data and collaborate with me and we'll use it to find the underlying genetics of vocal learning or flights or something interesting, right?
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
We did a bunch of bird genomes back in 2014 that made a lot of splash on revising the family tree of birds. We were able to find convergent genetic differences or genes that change in their regulation in the brains of humans and songbirds for speech and singing. And when we went to go study the function of those genes in vocal learning brain circuits,
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
My students and postdocs were finding all these errors that we had to fix and resequence those genes over again across multiple species, spending not just months, sometimes years and many thousands of dollars to do some of that work over again because of the poor quality genomes. And when I was asked to lead the Vertebrate Genomes Project because of our success with the bird work,
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
I kind of reluctantly accepted with the agreement with my colleagues in this global project that we're going to make it a mission to produce the highest quality genomic data possible before we embark on sequencing all of these species. They agreed, and that's how I got involved in genomics.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yeah, we learned everything. the lessons then, you know, in those first few years that it can't just be about quantity. Otherwise the science is going to suffer. And so that delayed us by a number of years.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
So I said, if we're going to put all this effort into trying to figure out how to produce high quality genomes of humans, of primates, of turtles, of birds, of fish, and they each have different kinds of requirements, let's just do them all.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yeah, so platypus, they represent, they're not the placental mammals. They actually lay eggs, right? So they're at the branches, at the base of the mammalian family tree, and there are only a few species left in that lineage. And so having a platypus would help us understand the origin of mammals.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
would help us understand the genetic differences between egg-laying mammals and in utero mammals, placental mammals.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yeah, so my own research on vocal learning and language is, So the ability to imitate sounds, like what we're doing now, producing imitated sounds that we've learned throughout adulthood and childhood, that's pretty rare. And we have it, songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, amongst birds have it, dolphins, seals, and bats, and amongst mammals, cetaceans.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Those are whales and dolphins, actually, and elephants. So it's a pretty rare trait. But all of us... that have this ability converged on a similar solution in the brain anatomy that we so far have been able to examine. And we've been looking to find if there's a similar genetic solution that's controlling that brain anatomy that allows us to produce spoken language.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
And so in order to answer that question, in order to understand how it evolved, in order to understand is it working similarly or differently in all these different species, we need the genomes of all those different species. And that's how it impacts me personally.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yes, that's my goal, right? I believe we will get a much better handle at figuring out the underlying genes and what we call the gene network of how those genes interact with each other from having these 260 species. At the next level, which represents all families, that's going to be over 1,200 species. We've done a study to show that
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
just on behavior alone, that some species of songbirds are more advanced than other species at their ability to imitate sounds, including human speech sounds. Like if Blue Jay is really great, a zebra finch is, you know, okay. And we found that there's a nice linear correlation between more advanced vocal learning abilities and problem-solving skills.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
So in phase two, we hope to be able to interrogate the genomes of species that are more advanced or less advanced at particular behaviors and get at the underlying genetics of even more detailed vocal learning skills.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Absolutely. So many people don't even realize this. If you ask people to say, what are the smartest animals out there, right? Without realizing, they'll name a dolphin. They'll say an elephant. They'll say a crow, which is a songbird or a parrot. So there's a high overlap in our natural perceptions of intelligent animals and vocal learners. And so I call this the vocal learning cognitive complex.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
where the ability to imitate sounds and communicate with learned vocalizations is associated with a set of complex behaviors that seem to co-evolve together, one of them being problem solving and another being unsuspecting dancing, synchronizing body movements to sound in a very rhythmic way that other species can't seem to do as well as vocal learners.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
So we're trying to take one or two individuals per species and sequence the genetic code, the entire code of that animal that represents that species, and do that for everybody. And we're putting it into a database that we're calling Genome Arc, with the pun intended, like, you know, an arc to basically save the genetic code of all species on the planet.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
That's right. I think it also means for all these species that we're getting the genetic data for, we're going to have to create a trait database for as well. We can say what the commonalities are and how those commonalities evolved either convergently or inherited from a common ancestor.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yes, actually. That idea is what we're pursuing in my group here, to try to genetically engineer or enhance vocal communication circuits, actually in mice. And we just submitted a preprint on this, and we'll see how it gets reviewed. But it's one of my favorite experiments because it takes discoveries that we learn through comparative genetics,
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
comparative neuroscience for a complex trait and try to recapitulate the evolution of that ability, you know, I think it'll take us a lot of years to really understand how these brain circuits work even more. But, you know, the little steps, you can take a little step and, you know, try to engineer these brain circuits.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Now, if you're able to do that, let's say in a mouse or repair a brain circuit in the sunburn, why not be able to enhance vocal communication circuits in humans or repair them if there's a disruption in certain connectivity due to stroke or a certain genetic disorder?
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
That's right. I know there are ethical concerns surrounding that, but the day will come.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
Yeah, I think we're going to... My prediction, and it's not even a prediction because we're already finding it out. We're finding out that we have to be careful about making assumptions about what makes us humans or using the word unique too liberally when we talk about ourselves. Yes, we can look out there in the rest of the world and find that...
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
We've been the only species that have built these giant tall buildings and airplanes and so forth. But there are other species that are out there building households of natural made products. Bowerbirds, right? That they build houses that last 30 years that they use for made attraction, for, you know, shelter and so forth.
Short Wave
The Ambitious Quest To Genetically Map All Known Vertebrates
And so we have to also kind of reclassify as to what we think is advanced complex intelligent behavior. And I think we're going to learn a lot more than what makes us unique. We're going to learn a lot more about what makes us the same.