WHEN you watch Kazuo Okanoya on stage, bobbing up and down, chirping, you know he is passionate about his work. His lab at the University of Tokyo
is alive with the sound of the birds that inspire his performance – row
upon row of cages full of Bengalese finches. You can see why he is so
taken by them. They are beautiful and good-natured, and they sing like a
dream.
Okanoya was brought up in rural Japan
surrounded by farm animals as well as his own menagerie of pet hamsters,
turtles, hermit crabs, chipmunks and finches. "As a child, I loved
animals more than humans," he says. That he ended up studying birds is
hardly surprising. But what he has discovered certainly is. He set out
to explore how singing cements the intense bond between pairs of
Bengalese finches and underpins their devoted parenting. Instead, his
experiments might have implications for one of evolution's most enduring
mysteries: the emergence of human language.
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