Robert Boyd

Robert Boyd is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. His area of expertise is cultural evolution. His research focuses on the evolutionary psychology of the mechanisms that give rise to — and influence — human culture, and how these mechanisms interact with population dynamic processes to shape human cultural variation. Boyd is also an affiliated professor with the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and the ASU Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity.

His work is summarized in three books, two coauthored with P. J. Richerson — Culture and the Evolutionary Process and Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution — and by Boyd individually, A Different Kind of Animal.