All animals communicate, but of all the species on Earth, humans alone have language. SFI External Professor Mark Pagel asks why. 

Read Pagel's Santa Fe New Mexican article (September 26, 2011)

Watch Pagel's Ted Global 2011 talk "How language transformed humanity" (July 2011)

"Like many of my colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, I use mathematical models to examine the evolutionary advantages, costs and implications of such traits over many generations," Pagel writes.

He believes language evolved as a response to another distinctly human advancement: social learning. But when humans learned to mimic and improve on the best ideas of other humans, they also created an evolutionary dilemma, he writes. 

"If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas -- a better way to catch a fish or a deadlier spear, for example...So, once your species acquires social learning, it behooves you, the individual, to hide your best ideas lest someone steals them and either uses them against you -- or uses them to become 'fitter' than you for the environment, leaving you and your genes in the evolutionary dustbin."

Read the SFI Update article (September/October 2011)