Mark Pagel Quotations

What drives the separation of groups of people into subgroups is the desire to control resources. We begin with a single culture, and over time the number of individuals within that culture expands.

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

We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating others.

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.

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

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.

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.

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.

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

It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.