EMBL Forum Lectures

Thursday, 17 October 2013 at 14:00 in the Large Operon, EMBL Heidelberg

Mark Pagel, University of Reading, UK

Reflections on the Origin of the Human Social Mind

Abstract

To come.

Biography

Professor Mark Pagel is an evolutionary theorist and fellow of Britain’s Royal Society, with interests in mathematical and statistical modeling of evolutionary processes. His current interests include language and cultural evolution, networks, regulation, emergence of complex systems, robustness and evolvability, punctuational versus gradual evolutionary change, and evolutionary genomics. His co-authored 1991 monograph on comparative statistical methods in evolutionary biology is standard reading for the field and he is the author of several other statistical methods for identifying and analyzing evolutionary trends and for inferring phylogenetic trees.   His group's work regularly appears in the pages of the journals Nature and Science, and receives widespread media attention.  Professor Pagel has recently been awarded £2 million from the European Research Council to continue his work on the evolution of human languages.  His book Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind was published in 2012.