TED Talks - Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

This is from a couple of months back, but it's an interesting theory - we can only make conjectures about how language transformed human culture, or even created it, but it's hopeful to think that if language helped us develop culture, it can also help us transform our culture from the mess it is now to something better, based on cooperation and compassion.

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

Why you should listen to him:

Mark Pagel builds statistical models to examine the evolutionary processes imprinted in human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems -- to culture. His latest work examines the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution by applying methods of phylogenetics, or the study of evolutionary relatedness among groups, essentially viewing language as a culturally transmitted replicator with many of the same properties we find in genes. He’s looking for patterns in the rates of evolution of language elements, and hoping to find the social factors that influence trends of language evolution.

At the University of Reading, Pagel heads the Evolution Laboratory in the biology department, where he explores such questions as, "Why would humans evolve a system of communication that prevents them with communicating with other members of the same species?" He has used statistical methods to reconstruct features of dinosaur genomes, and to infer ancestral features of genes and proteins.

He says: "Just as we have highly conserved genes, we have highly conserved words. Language shows a truly remarkable fidelity."

"What the new studies accomplish is a far more sophisticated analysis of the regularity of language change that earlier scholars noted or theorized,"

Linguistic Anthropology blog