#mark pagel

[noosphe-re]

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound.

Mark Pagel, TED Talks, How language transformed humanity

[effemerideitalia]

Le origini evolutive della violenza letale umana

Le origini evolutive della violenza letale umana

Più violenti del resto dei mammiferi, ma nelle società più complesse si uccide meno che in quelle dispotiche

Gli esseri umani sono naturalmente violenti, come diceva Hobbes, o sono pacifici fino a che non vengono corrotti dalla civilizzazione, come suggeriva Rousseau? Questa domanda ha impegnato da sempre pensatori e scienziati, ma ora lo  studio “The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence”,…

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[scrambledbooks]

Language and Agriculture

The archaeologist Colin Renfrew in his Archaeology and Language links the spread of these languages to the origin of agriculture sometime around 9,000–10,000 years ago in the region of the world known as the Fertile Crescent (roughly present-day Turkey and Iraq). Farming reset the world’s carrying capacity to a higher level, allowing a greater number of people to survive in a given area. The growing populations meant that farmers and their ideas spread out in all directions from the Fertile Crescent. Those that went north and west formed what we recognize today as the Greek, Germanic, and Romance or Latinate languages of Western Europe; those that went north and east produced the Slavic languages; and those that went south gave rise to the languages of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The Basque language of northern Spain, although in Europe, is not an Indo-European language. In fact, it might be an isolated remant of the languages that were spoken by the hunter-gatherers in Europe before farming and farmers arrived. Russell Gray and his colleagues were later able to confirm Renfrew’s arguments by applying dating techniques to the Indo-European languages, confirming that this family probably did arise sometime around 9,000 years ago. And it is because of descent with modification within the separate branches of this family that today we recognize similarities in the Romance languages of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, just as we recognize similarities in the Germanic languages of German, Danish, Dutch, and English. ========== Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (Mark Pagel)

[leadbig]

First Friday Favs 9.5.14

First Friday Favs 9.5.14

As I tippy-toe back into a new routine, my reading this past month has been all over the place. An eclectic assortment of favs, for sure.

Please enjoy these highlights!

20 Paradoxes That Are True | Mark Manson Mark Manson

(more…)

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[beautifulbonesstuff]

My Supervisor’s Work Has Been Featured in a Rap Music Video! So apparently this comedian, Zach Sherwin, came across the article my supervisor published last year. The article investigates 'ultraconserved words'.

[too-much-m]

There are currently 7,000 different languages spoken, or 7,000 mutually unintelligible systems of communication in one species... more languages than mammals species. The closer the tribes the more you'll find variations in language. Humans unlike any other animal can't communicate with other members of its own species.

Wired For Culture.

Mark Pagel.

[impossibletheater]

David Brown:

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic “weathering” and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.

A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true.

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”

The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.

["Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating" but] "We’ve never heard this language, and it’s not written down anywhere,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England who headed the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

In all, “proto-Eurasiatic” gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world’s important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan; several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.

[linguisticious-blog]

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity (by TEDtalksDirector)