Robert T. Boyd

Rob Boyd is an evolutionary anthropologist who is know for his work on the how culture has transformed the human evolutionary process making humans better able to adapt to a wide range of environments and cooperate to solve large scale collective action problems. He grew up in Northern California, received a BA in physics at the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in ecology at the University of California, Davis. He has held academic positions at Duke University, Emory University, UCLA, and is currently affiliated with the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his book, Culture and the Evolutionary Process co-authored with Peter J. Richerson received the J. I. Staley award. He has published many papers, and several books. Rob was co-director of Preferences Network funded by the MacArthur Foundation and organized one of the first experimental studies of human social motivations that sampled a variety of small-scale societies. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife Joan Silk, and when he is not working, he likes to explore wild places in the American west.