Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language.

Pagel frames human language as an evolutionary adaptation with unusual social power: it can transmit ideas, norms, and intentions directly into other brains, rapidly reshaping behavior without genetic change. Calling it “dangerous and subversive” highlights that language is not merely descriptive but instrumental—capable of persuasion, coordination, deception, and the creation of shared fictions (religion, law, ideology) that can overturn existing hierarchies. The “neural audio technology” metaphor stresses its embodied, brain-hacking quality: speech is a tool that exploits human cognition to copy mental states between individuals. In this view, language is a prime driver of cultural evolution, enabling cooperation at scale while also enabling manipulation and conflict.