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Editor’s summary

The ability to perform complex behaviors, including human speech, is encoded in the billions of nucleotides that make up the genome, the result of millions of years of evolutionary optimization. Although speech itself is uniquely human, vocal learning, the ability to modify vocal output as a result of experience, has evolved independently in multiple mammals, including many bats. Wirthlin et al. combined experiments in the bat brain with an artificial intelligence–based analysis of more than 200 genomes and found hundreds of genomic regions that are associated with vocal learning. Their results implicate networks of genes related to human autism. —Di Jiang