Mark Pagel quotes

It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. (Mark Pagel)
Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language. View quote
Mark Pagel
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 environment will allow it. We see great cultural diversity and large numbers of cultures per unit area in regions of the world in which the environment is really rich. View quote
Mark Pagel
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 and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals. View quote
Mark Pagel
Human cultural diversity is vast; the range of cultural practices, beliefs, and languages that we speak is vast. View quote
Mark Pagel
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 from the genes they pass to us. View quote
Mark Pagel