Mark Pagel Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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