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Portrait of Mark Pagel

Mark Pagel

(1954) Evolutionary Biologist

16 quotes in 185 categories

Mark Pagel is an evolutionary biologist, best known for Wired for Culture.

Quick Facts About Mark Pagel

Born: June 5, 1954
Profession: Evolutionary Biologist
Notable works: Wired for Culture

About Mark Pagel

Mark David Pagel FRS is an evolutionary biologist and professor. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading. He is known for comparative studies in evolutionary biology. In 1994, with his spouse, anthropologist Ruth Mace, Pagel pioneered the Comparative Method in Anthropology.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Quotes by Mark Pagel

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if…

Act

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We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to…

Among

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It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride,…

Activity

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Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural…

Audio

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[Language allows you] to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the…

Brain

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Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind…

Accept

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

Accounts

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Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we…

Animals

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I think the driving force for cultural evolution is this desire for groups to be splitting off and separating and forming subgroups…

Allow

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Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our…

Accumulate

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

Ancestors

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

Destiny

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We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

Accepting

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

About

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What drives the separation of groups of people into subgroups is the desire to control resources. We begin with a single culture,…

Begin

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

Beliefs

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