Mark Pagel

Mark David Pagel FRS (born 5 June 1954 in Seattle, Washington)[1] is an evolutionary biologist and professor. He heads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading.[1][2][3][4] He is known for comparative studies in evolutionary biology. In 1994, with his spouse, anthropologist Ruth Mace, Pagel pioneered the Comparative Method in Anthropology.

Mark Pagel
Born
Mark David Pagel

(1954-06-05) 5 June 1954[1]
Seattle, Washington, US[1]
Alma materUniversity of Washington
Known forCo-developer of the Comparative Method in Anthropology
Spouse(s)Ruth Mace
Children2
AwardsFRS (2011)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisDeterminants of the Success and Failure of Ridge Regression (1980)
Websiteevolution.reading.ac.uk

Education

Pagel was educated at the University of Washington where he was awarded a PhD in Mathematics in 1980 for work on ridge regression.[5]

Research

During the late 1980s, Pagel worked on developing ways to analyse species relatedness, in the zoology department at the University of Oxford. Having met there, in 1994, Pagel and anthropologist Ruth Mace co-authored a paper, "The Comparative Method in Anthropology", that used phylogenetic methods to analyse human cultures, pioneering a new field of science — using evolutionary trees, or phylogenies, in anthropology, to explain human behaviour.[6] Pagel's interests include evolution and the development of languages.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

Pagel was the editor-in-chief for the Encyclopedia of Evolution, published in 2002.[14] He authored Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation,[15][16] which was voted one of best science books of 2012 by The Guardian.[17]

Personal life

Pagel's partner is Ruth Mace, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.[1][18] Together they have two sons,[1] the first of whom was born the same year that Pagel's and Mace's landmark work, "The Comparative Method in Anthropology", was published in Current Anthropology.[12]

Awards and honours

Pagel was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011. His nomination reads:

Mark Pagel is distinguished for having shown how a combination of phylogenetic trees of species and knowledge of their features can be used to reconstruct the evolutionary past and how it gave rise to the present. He has introduced novel statistical modeling techniques that provide solutions to outstanding problems of trait evolution. These solutions have influenced how evolutionary biologists and anthropologists conduct their science and the evolutionary questions they test. He has used his approaches to address and solve questions of fundamental importance involving speciation, adaptation, punctuational evolution and human cultural and linguistic evolution.[17]

References
  1. "PAGEL, Prof. Mark". Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. Staff Profile: Professor Mark Pagel School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading. 24 August 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2012. Archived here
  3. Mark Pagel's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  4. Reading Evolutionary Biology Group – Home. Archived here.
  5. Pagel, Mark (2014). Determinants of the Success and Failure of Ridge Regression (PhD thesis). University of Washington. ProQuest 303081403.
  6. Smith, Kerri (26 June 2014). "Love in the lab: Close collaborators". Nature. 160 (510): 458–460. Bibcode:2014Natur.510..458S. doi:10.1038/510458a. PMID 24965634.
  7. English language 'originated in Turkey' by Jonathan Ball, BBC News, 25 August 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
  8. Pagel, M. (1999). "Inferring the historical patterns of biological evolution". Nature. 401 (6756): 877–84. Bibcode:1999Natur.401..877P. doi:10.1038/44766. hdl:2027.42/148253. PMID 10553904.
  9. Freckleton, R. P.; Harvey, P. H.; Pagel, M. (2002). "Phylogenetic Analysis and Comparative Data: A Test and Review of Evidence". The American Naturalist. 160 (6): 712–26. doi:10.1086/343873. PMID 18707460.
  10. Pagel, M. (1997). "Inferring evolutionary processes from phylogenies". Zoologica Scripta. 26 (4): 331–348. doi:10.1111/j.1463-6409.1997.tb00423.x.
  11. Pagel, M.; Meade, A.; Barker, D. (2004). "Bayesian Estimation of Ancestral Character States on Phylogenies". Systematic Biology. 53 (5): 673–84. doi:10.1080/10635150490522232. PMID 15545248.
  12. Mace, Ruth; Pagel, Mark (1994). "The Comparative Method in Anthropology". Current Anthropology. 35 (5): 549. doi:10.1086/204317.
  13. Mark Pagel at TED
  14. Encyclopedia of Evolution. 2 volume set. USA: OUP. 2002. ISBN 978-0-19-512200-8. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
  15. Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation ISBN 1846140153
  16. Julian Baggini (23 February 2012). "Wired for Culture by Mark Pagel – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 July 2012.
  17. Professor Mark Pagel FRS, The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge
  18. Smith, K. (2014). "Love in the lab: Close collaborators". Nature. 510 (7506): 458–460. Bibcode:2014Natur.510..458S. doi:10.1038/510458a. PMID 24965634.


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