The Speech Gene

A Romanian joke/saying (it’s hard to differentiate since many start as the former and end up as the latter) goes something like this: “Why do they call it a ‘maternal tongue’? Because guess who uses it the most!”

That’s just my silly preface for this piece in The New York Times that looks at FOXP2, the gene that underlies the faculty of human speech – the title they bestow upon it is that of “maestro of the genome”:

The gene does not do a single thing but rather controls the activity of at least 116 other genes, Dr. Geschwind’s team says in the Thursday issue of Nature.
Like the conductor of an orchestra, the gene quiets the activity of some and summons a crescendo from others. …
Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

Imagine hundreds of tiny genes mingling over RNAi cocktails and exchanging genomic business cards… As they say in my line of work, networking is key!