Does Language Bring Us Together Or Pull Us Apart?
By
NPR/TED Staff |
NPR
Friday, December 13, 2013
Update RequiredTo play audio, update browser or
Flash plugin.
"It is really peculiar on the face of it that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating with each other." — Mark Pagel
James Duncan Davidson
/
TED
Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Spoken And Unspoken.
About Mark Pagel's TEDTalk
Biologist Mark Pagel says our complex language system is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.
About Mark Pagel
Mark Pagel is the head of the Evolution Laboratory in the biology department at the University of Reading. Pagel builds statistical models to examine how evolutionary processes imprint in human behavior, from genomics to the emergence of complex systems to culture. His latest work examines the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution. Pagel argues language is a culturally transmitted replicator with many of the same properties we find in genes.
Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
View this story on npr.org
Follow us for more stories like this
CapRadio provides a trusted source of news because of you. As a nonprofit organization, donations from people like you sustain the journalism that allows us to discover stories that are important to our audience. If you believe in what we do and support our mission, please donate today.
Donate Today