Leda Cosmides

Leda Cosmides ( born May 7, 1957 in Philadelphia, United States) is an American psychologist. Together with her husband John Tooby she is founder and director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cosmides and Tooby shall be the founding figures of the modern evolutionary psychology.

After studying biology at Harvard University Cosmides 1985 acquired her PhD in psychology at the same university. 1989 to 1990 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Roger Shepard at Stanford University. Since 1990 she is employed at the Institute of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Cosmides main research areas are evolutionary psychology and cognitive psychology. Together with Tooby they tried to establish the evolutionary psychology as a new paradigm of psychological research. They equally working on basic problems and specific studies about to cooperative behavior and incest avoidance.

• J. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby: The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992
• L. Cosmides and J. Tooby: Universal Minds: Explaining the new science of evolutionary psychology. ( Darwinism Today Series). Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Yale, Yale University Press, London 2008