James W. MINETT is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include electroencephalography (EEG), language and the brain, the computational modeling of language emergence, change and death, and the development of quantitative methods for historical linguistics. William S-Y. WANG is Wei Lun Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong based in the Department of Electronic Engineering, with affiliations to the Center for East Asian Studies, the Department of Translation, and the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages. He is an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan). He has published widely for both technical and general readerships, including articles in American Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, as well as in many encyclopedias. He has long been involved in evolutionary studies of language from a multi-disciplinary perspective, particularly the biological and computer sciences.