Mark Pagel Quotes

#1. Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

Mark Pagel

#2. It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.

Mark Pagel

#3. 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.

Mark Pagel

#4. Human cultural diversity is vast; the range of cultural practices, beliefs, and languages that we speak is vast.

Mark Pagel

#5. 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 others.

Mark Pagel

#6. [Language allows you] to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery.

Mark Pagel

#7. 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.

Mark Pagel

#8. 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 even knowing it.

Mark Pagel

#9. 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 emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.

Mark Pagel

#10. You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.

Mark Pagel

#11. 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 number of individuals within that culture expands.

Mark Pagel

#12. No wonder the creationists don't believe the darwinian account.

Mark Pagel