From Technology Review, an article on the genetics of language: Researchers are beginning to crack the code that gives humans our way with words. Evolution of counting is no simple operation: When it comes to tallying objects, some modern languages have become less complex. Steven Pinker on The Moral Instinct: Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses — do we know what to do with them? Only by conceiving of evolution as acting upon entire populations rather than individual organisms can we understand eusociality — the mysterious, seemingly "altruistic" behaviors exhibited by insects who forego reproduction in order to care for a colony's young, says Edward O. Wilson.
