Erich Jarvis has a selfish reason for wanting to sequence the genomes of thousands of endangered animals. He needs a bunch of these species to survive long enough for him to study them. "For me this is the moral thing to do," said Jarvis, a researcher at Rockefeller University, who studies how the brain processes sound, music, and language. He uses birdsongs to understand how these processes evolved. "From my own scientific perspective, a number of the species I'm most interested in studying for my evolution of language research include species that are going extinct."

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