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 Copy Share Image
Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
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… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
[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… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
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… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
I think the driving force for cultural evolution is this desire for groups to be splitting off and separating and forming subgroups insofar as… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages. — Mark Pagel Copy Share
It might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. — Mark Pagel Copy Share
We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it. — Mark Pagel Copy Share
Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does. — Mark Pagel Copy Share
What drives the separation of groups of people into subgroups is the desire to control resources. We begin with a single culture, and over… — Mark Pagel Copy Share
