Don't count on your chickens counting

Clocks and calendars, sports scores and stock-market tickers - our society is saturated with numbers. One of the first things we teach our children is to count, just as we teach them their ABCs. But is this evidence of a biological drive? No, says cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez of the University of California San Diego. It is evidence of our cultural preoccupations. "Numerical cognition," he says, "is not biologically endowed."