Mark David Pagel FRS (born 5 June 1954 in Seattle, Washington)[1] is an evolutionary biologist and professor.
Pagel was a student educated at the University of Washington where he was awarded a PhD in Mathematics in 1980 for work on ridge regression.
[5] During the late 1980s, Pagel worked on developing ways to analyse species relatedness, in the zoology department at the University of Oxford.
[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.
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.