John Tooby

John Tooby ( born July 26, 1952 in Saint Paul, Minnesota) is an American anthropologist. Together with his wife Leda Cosmides, he is the founder and director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tooby and Cosmides shall be the founding figures of the modern evolutionary psychology.

Tooby studied from 1975 behavioral biology and experimental psychology at Harvard University, in 1989 he earned his PhD in biological anthropology also at Harvard. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University Tooby came in 1990 at the Anthropological Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. 1999 to 2001 he was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

Toobys main area of ​​work is the evolutionary psychology, which is the study of the human mind from an evolutionary perspective. Here, along with Cosmides Tooby employs the one with fundamental debates such as the question of the modularity of mind and the relationship between evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. On the other hand, however, he is also working on specific projects such as the evolutionary psychology research on the choice of a partner or the detection of lies and fraudulent behavior.

• 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, London, Yale University Press, Yale 2008