Provost Lecture: Mark Pagel - The Evolution of Human Languages

The Evolution of Human Languages: An Evolutionary Biologist’s Perspective Mark Pagel, a professor of evolutionary biology at Reading University, U.K., and a Fellow of the Royal Society, is one of the world’s most distinguished evolutionary biologists. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of how to construct evolutionary trees and has applied these accomplishments to understanding the evolution of languages. His book Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (W.W. Norton) was named one of 2012’s best science books by The Guardian. Human beings speak approximately 7,000 mutually unintelligible languages around the world, giving our species the curious distinction that most of us cannot understand what most other people are saying. Pagel will explore the origins of our unique language capability, ask whether any other species could speak, and highlight the remarkable features of language that allow it to evolve and adapt much like genes do, meaning we can trace its evolution back thousands of years into our past.