Mark Pagel

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Mark David Pagel (born June 5, 1954, in Seattle) is an American-born evolutionary biologist and professor who leads the Evolutionary Biology Group at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He studies how evolution shapes life, languages, and cultures.

With anthropologist Ruth Mace, he co-developed the Comparative Method in Anthropology in 1994. This approach uses evolutionary trees to study how human cultures and behaviors change over time.

Pagel earned a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Washington in 1980, focusing on ridge regression. He later worked at the University of Oxford before joining the University of Reading.

He has edited and written influential works, including the Encyclopedia of Evolution (editor-in-chief, 2002) and Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation, which The Guardian named as one of the best science books of 2012. In 2019 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow on the origins of the human social mind. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011 for his work on using phylogenetic trees and data to understand evolution, including human culture and language.

Pagel and his partner, Ruth Mace, have two sons. Mace is a professor at University College London.