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Robert Boyd

Appointment

  • Advisor
  • Institutions, Organizations & Growth

About

Robert Boyd is an evolutionary anthropologist whose research is focused on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to human culture, and shape it; and on how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. He uses a combination of mathematical modelling, laboratory experiments and ethnographic fieldwork to address these questions.

Awards

  • Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Cambridge, 2005–2006
  • Invited fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2001–2002
  • J. I. Staley Prize for Culture and the Evolutionary Process, 1989
  • John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1988–1989

Relevant Publications

  • Derex, M., and R. Boyd. “The foundations of the human cultural niche.” Nat. Commun. 6 (2015): 8398.

  • Boyd, R. et al. “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108 (2011): 10918–10925.

  • Mathew, S., and R. Boyd. “Punishment sustains large-scale cooperation in prestate warfare.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108 (2011): 11375–11380.

  • Perrault, C. et al. “A Bayesian Approach to the Evolution of Social Learning.” Evol. Hum. Behav. 33 (December 2011): 449–59.

  • Kline, M., and R. Boyd. “Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania.” Proc. R. Soc. B 277 (2010): 2559–2564.

  • Richerson, P.J., and R. Boyd. Not by Genes Alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. (Translated into Korean and Italian.)

  • Henrich, J. et al. The Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  • Boyd, R., and P.J. Richerson. Culture and the Evolutionary Process, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Institution

  • Arizona State University

Department

School of Human Evolution and Social Change

Education

  • PhD (Ecology), University of California, Davis

Country

  • United States

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