For thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the purpose of language. Plato believed it was essential for thinking. Thought “is a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself,” he wrote.

Many modern scholars have advanced similar views. Starting in the 1960s, Noam Chomsky, a linguist at M.I.T., argued that we use language for reasoning and other forms of thought. “If there is a severe deficit of language, there will be severe deficit of thought,” he wrote.

Continue reading “Do We Need Language to Think?” →

ADVENTURES IN VOLCANOLAND: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin Mather

I live on a hump of pink granite, part of a geological formation that stretches across southern Connecticut, lurching out of the ground here and there like a pod of surfacing whales.

Before my wife and I bought our house, we had an inspector give it a look. “Well,” he said, “your foundation goes down a thousand miles into the Earth — so nothing to worry about there.”

Over the past 500 million years, vertebrates have evolved into a staggering variety of forms, from hummingbirds to elephants, bullfrogs to hammerhead sharks, not to mention our peculiar species of upright ape. But underneath all that diversity, vertebrates share some key features.

We all have a backbone made of vertebrae, for example, along with a skull that houses a brain. We share these hallmarks because we all descended from a common ancestor: a fish that swam in the Cambrian seas.

Continue reading “Was This Sea Creature Our Ancestor? Scientists Turn a Famous Fossil on Its Head.” →

Last year, Jaume Pellicer led a team of fellow scientists into a forest on Grande Terre, an island east of Australia. They were in search of a fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. Standing just a few inches tall, it was not easy to find on the forest floor.

“It doesn’t catch the eye,” said Dr. Pellicer, who works at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain. “You would probably step on it and not even realize it.”

Continue reading “Scientists Find the Largest Known Genome Inside a Small Plant” →