The Evolution of Language
September 25, 2007
Illustration by Thomas Porostocky
Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution.
Why are humans the only species to have suddenly hit upon the remarkable possibilities of language? If speech is a product of our DNA, then surely other species also have some of the same genes required for language because of our basic, shared biochemistry. One of our closest relatives should have developed something that is akin to language, or another species should have happened upon its attendant advantages through parallel evolution.
A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution. Its rapid spread makes language seem more like a viral epidemic that swept through the human population rather than a trait inherited through the typical dynamics of evolution.
Cribsheet #11: Plate Tectonics
September 10, 2007
Scientific issues and innovations are figuring into everyday conversation more than ever before. Recognizing that we could all use some brushing up, Seed offers its Cribsheet.
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Plate Tectonics
The theory of plate tectonics posits that the Earth's surface is profoundly altered by rigid slabs of rock called "plates" sliding across a hotter, deeper layer. This Cribsheet covers the basics of plate tectonics: why plates move, what causes earthquakes and volcanoes, and how oceanic trenches form. In addition, we tell you how old the oceanic crust is in different parts of the world and why knowledge of plate tectonics will help us accommodate a growing global population.
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Illustrator: Cybu Richli — www.cybu.ch; Writer: Lee Billings; Map data adapted from NOAA and USGS; Consultant: William B. F. Ryan, Doherty Senior Scholar, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
The Meaning of Life
September 5, 2007
Generative art by Jared Tarbell
It's hard to think of a word more charged with meaning—or meanings—than "life." Some of the most passionate debates of our day, over stem cells or the right to die, genetically modified food, or wartime conduct, revolve around it. Whether we're talking about when life begins or when it ends, the sanctity of life, or the danger of playing God, we all have an idea of what we mean when we talk about life. Yet, it often turns out, we actually mean different things. Scientists, despite their intimacy with the subject, aren't exempt from this confusion.
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