"The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry" is a good book on human evolution using European population as a case study. It even helps to explain some politics, like Basque nationalist movement ETA.
Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature explains why the U.S. crime rate is always one magnitude higher than Europe, why gun is so wide spread and harder to control in the U.S. than Germany, China, Japan, France, even Britain.
Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate traces the western debate of nature vs nurture, offers lots of insight for education. The short version is that we are not born as "blank slate", we are very much "pre-programmed" with instinct. The Language Instinct is one of such instinct.
Steven Pinker started out as an evolutionary physiologist and cognitive scientist before he becomes a public intellectual. His book How the Mind Works summarizes lots of his work and the field's advancement in recent decades.
Our mind uses two very different systems: one is fast, one is slow. One is based on pattern recognition, one is based on logic. One is emotional, one is deliberate. It definitely helps me to recognize the emotions in this very group, the way people reach a position based on emotional, then find rationales to justify their position. The way people becomes blinded to obvious logic flaw because they are emotionally invested in their positions.
Language is the key to a treasure box called culture. The treasure box behind English is several magnitudes larger than the treasure box behind Chinese. If it's up to me, I would revive a 五四新文化运动和明治维新时代 proposal: using English to teach, at least at the college level. One of the advantage of Indians over Chinese is their college education is in English, and they had easier access to the bigger treasure box.
some of the cognitive study have show that when a person use a unfamiliar language to read, it tends to use system two ( rational/analytical ) part of the brain. If the content require logical mind, they ends up understand better
