The End of Anthropology? | Gifford Lectures 2019 | Prof Mark Pagel | Pt 4

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



Lecture 4: The end of Anthropology? What does the future hold for the world’s languages and cultures?


The existence of easy high-speed travel, unprecedented levels of migration, and globalisation in the form of 24-hour worldwide media and social media are bringing about a rapid blending of the world’s peoples, their societies and their languages. Already over 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and the numbers are rising. Are we still evolving, and what will our cities, languages and cultures look like in 50-100 years?


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.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/