Joan Silk

Joan Silk is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, did postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago, and taught briefly at Emory University before joining the faculty at UCLA in 1986. Her work has mainly focused on the evolutionary basis of behavior in nonhuman primates, with a special emphasis on the reproductive strategies and social behavior of females. Along with her husband, Robert Boyd, she is the author of How Humans Evolved, a wellregarded textbook that integrates evolutionary theory, primate behavioral ecology, the human fossil record, and contemporary human behavior. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in questions that explicitly link studies of nonhuman primates to humans, probing the origins of capacities that play a crucial role in human societies, such as reconciliation, cooperation, social bonds and friendship, and prosocial sentiments.