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I study the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural underpinnings of the languages of the world, not only as they exist now but also as they unfolded over the course of the Holocene. I rely primarily on the statistical and computational analysis of diverse...

I study information transmission via culture, and I do it with tools I've developed for measuring the flow of memes through minds. These tools are quantitative (in that we end up with bits and so have a common currency), content-agnostic (so we don't have...

I study how features of contemporary industrialized societies, in contrast to our hunter‑gatherer past, shape young people’s social worlds, coming‑of‑age experiences, and mental health, with an eye toward improving how we support adolescents and young...

Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology

My research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture...

The structure of human cognition is underdetermined by our genetic makeup to a unique degree - evident from our species' unparalleled diversity of cognitive and behavioral repertoires. It follows that determining which repertoire an individual human ends...

My research focuses on answering three broad questions: (1) Why are humans so different to other animals? (2) What are the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and social change, and how is information transmitted, maintained...