The Neurological Roots of Aggression

Recent findings shed light on the brain deficits that underlie aggression and could aid in the development of preventative treatments.

Science is Golden

Illustration by Adam Billyeald

In 2005, UNESCO's Science Report identified the Arab region as the least R&D intensive area in the world. Moreover, rather than focus on scientific innovation at home, Arab nations spent a staggering trillion dollars importing scientific and technological knowhow over the past three decades.

Now, a number of these nations are shifting their attention to developing regional R&D. Earlier this year, the 22 nations of the Arab League approved a 10-year plan to boost scientific research. It calls for member states to raise their allocation to science twelvefold to 2.5 percent of GDP—more than the average 2.3 percent spent by developed nations.

Arab political leaders are laying down the foundation for a strong scientific community. "It is a substantial step forward," says Mohamed Hassan, director of the Third World Academy of Sciences in Trieste, Italy. "If there is a political will to regionalize and internationalize initiatives, it would be of great benefit to the Arab world. The worry is that these [initiatives] will remain localized."

The Evolution of Language

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

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.

The Meaning of Life

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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