[4] Since graduating from the University of Sussex in 1966, Knight has been exploring the idea that language emerged in the human species through a process of incremental Darwinian evolution culminating at a certain point in revolutionary change.
In pursuing this line of thought, Knight takes inspiration not only from modern Darwinian theorists such as Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith but also from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who in their later years were fascinated by what was then the new science of anthropology.
[5] In 1996, working with Professor James Hurford, Knight co-founded the EVOLANG series of international conferences on the origins of language, since when he has become a prominent figure in debates on this topic.
According to the New Musical Express, writing at the time: 'Pit Dragon has managed to harness the talents of every worthwhile artist on the seamier side of the London cabaret circuit and the potential to develop into the most dynamic political/cultural organisation since Rock Against Racism.'
Knight had the idea of inviting fire-eaters, tightrope walkers, poets, comedians, jugglers and musicians to meet at the gates of Neasden Power Station in Brent, North London.
Linking up with activists in the anti-car movement Reclaim the Streets, Knight used his position in the London Support Group to introduce the dockers to these 'Kill the Car' environmentalists.
On 28 September, a 10,000 strong celebratory cultural event and street party was held on the quayside, followed at break of dawn next morning by a mass picket and symbolic roof-top occupation of what the dockers termed 'the rat house' – the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company headquarters and nearby gantries.
The dispute now gathered momentum in such a way that by late January 1997, trade unionists in over a hundred ports and cities across the world had linked up with environmentalists and others in making the action global.
[24] Among the roots of the 'Battle of Seattle' which broke out in November 1999 were the cultural events sponsored by Knight and his Reclaim the Streets friends in Liverpool on the opposite side of the world.
These developments in Seattle ensured that when the World Trade Organization decided to hold its 1999 Convention in the city, activists across the area were primed for unusually creative and imaginative resistance to the WTO's globalisation project.
[30][31][32][20] On 30 November 2011, Knight was one of 21 'Occupy London' activists arrested and later charged with public order offences for occupying the Haymarket (Central London) offices of the mining company Xstrata in a protest against the company's diversion of the McArthur River in the Northern Territory of Australia, violating sites held sacred by the Yanyuwa, Mara, Garrawa and Gurdanji traditional owners of the region.
[35] William Lowry Craig Knight was born in Cookstown, Co. Tyrone in 1889 and educated in the Royal School, Dungannon and Pembroke College, Cambridge.
British Consul-General in Tunis, 1937–40; Basra, 1942–46; Athens, 1946 and Salonica, 1946–49, W. L. C. Knight is today perhaps best known as the author of a Foreign Office memorandum which, in 1941, recommended the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
Once again they were in the heart of the action around Caen and Falaise, then through northern France and into Holland where they were a vital part of Operation Market Garden, protecting the land corridor to Arnhem.