| Citation | 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. |