'Wired for Culture: the origins of the human social mind, or why humans occupied the world' - The Gifford Lectures 2019

Lecture 1: 'The evolution of language: from speech to culture'

All animals communicate, but language is uniquely human. In this talk, Mark Pagel will show how human languages evolve very much like biological species and even adapt to their hosts – human speakers. He will discuss when language emerged, whether Neanderthals and other hominins were capable of speech, and ask the question of why only humans seem to have language. Professor Pagel will show how language has been more important to human success than have our genes, and that many of our genetic traits exist because of language. Finally, we will explore why are there so many languages and what does the future hold for them.

Dates: 23, 24, 28, 29 October 2019
Location: Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre, University of Glasgow

Mark Pagel is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Reading University in the UK. He is best known for his work on building statistical models to examine the evolutionary processes imprinted in animal and human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems – to language and culture. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution and co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology which is regarded as a classic in the field. He is widely published in Nature and Science. His book 'Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind' was one of the Guardian newspaper’s best science books of 2012.

The University of Glasgow, changing the world since 1451.
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