Mark Pagel

Mark Pagel
Born	Mark David Pagel June 5, 1954[1] Seattle, Washington, U.S.[1]
Fields	Evolution Phylogenetics Evolutionary linguistics
Institutions	University of Reading University of Oxford
Alma mater	University of Washington
Thesis	Determinants of the Success and Failure of Ridge Regression (1980)
Notable awards	FRS (2011)
Spouse	Ruth Mace[1][2]
Website www.evolution.reading.ac.uk

Mark David Pagel FRS (born June 5, 1954 in Seattle, Washington)^[1] is a Professor and head of the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading.^[1][3][4][5]

Education

Pagel was educated at the University of Washington where he was awarded a PhD in Mathematics in 1980 for work on ridge regression.^[6]

Research

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] and the author of the 2012 book Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation.^[15][16]

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. Smith, K. (2014). "Love in the lab: Close collaborators". Nature 510 (7506): 458. doi:10.1038/510458a.
3. Staff Profile: Professor Mark Pagel School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading. 24 August 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2012. Archived here
4. Mark Pagel's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
5. Reading Evolutionary Biology Group - Home. Archived here.
6. Pagel, Mark (2014). Determinants of the Success and Failure of Ridge Regression (PhD thesis). University of Washington.
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. doi:10.1038/44766. 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. doi:10.1086/343873. PMID 18707460.
10. Pagel, M. (1997). "Inferring evolutionary processes from phylogenies". Zoologica Scripta 26 (4): 331. 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. doi:10.1080/10635150490522232. PMID 15545248.
12. Mace, R.; Pagel, M. (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 March 24, 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