Biology: Concepts and Investigations 2nd Edition by Mariëlle Hoefnagels

Exercise 13

A young zebra finch must learn to sing. Researchers used a modified virus to deliver a "mirror image" of the FOXP2 gene to the brain of a young finch. With the FOXP2 gene silenced, the bird's song-learning ability was impaired. Why did the treatment silence the gene? How does this experiment relate to the study of human language?