Greg Cochran
American physicist and evolutionary theorist, longtime collaborator of the late anthropologist Henry Harpending. The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009, with Harpending) argues that human biological evolution has accelerated — not stopped or slowed — since the agricultural revolution, driven by rapid population growth (more mutations, bigger substrate for selection) and by the novel selective environments created by agriculture, cities, and complex society. The book presents the most explicitly biological version of the Industrial Revolution selection argument: that centuries of differential reproduction by English propertied classes plausibly shifted heritable behavioral traits enough to matter. A fringe view in academic economic history, but an influential one in adjacent evolutionary and anthropological literatures.
Associated positions
Section titled “Associated positions”- Genetic selection — the biological / evolutionary-theorist version.
Key works
Section titled “Key works”- With Henry Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009).
- Blog and essays at West Hunter (with Harpending until 2016; solo after).