Mark David Pagel FRS (born June 5, 1954 in Seattle, Washington) is a Professor and head of the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading. Read full biography of Mark Pagel →
Human cultural diversity is vast; the range of cultural practices, beliefs, and languages that we speak is vast.
I think the driving force for cultural evolution is this desire for groups to be splitting off and separating and forming subgroups insofar as the... →
Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will... →
Some people think culture is a virus that infects our minds and controls us in ways that don't serve us but serve it; I actually think we've... →
Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio... →
You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.
Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without... →
Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than... →
We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating... →
What drives the separation of groups of people into subgroups is the desire to control resources. We begin with a single culture, and over time the... →
Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.
It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.
Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an... →
Mark David Pagel FRS (born June 5, 1954 in Seattle, Washington) is a Professor and head of the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading.