Peter J. Richerson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis. During his first career, he studied the ecology of lakes, but he also became increasingly interested in human evolution. Beginning in the 1970s, he and colleague Rob Boyd were among the scholars who laid the foundation of cultural evolutionary theory. This work has been hugely influential in the development of "dual-inheritance theory," which looks at how genes and culture co-evolve. His books with Rob Boyd include Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) and Not by Genes Alone (2005) (University of Chicago Press, 2005). His current research is focused on cultural evolution, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture.
