Henry Plotkin
British psychologist (1940–2021)
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Through Darwinism
Early life and education
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Plotkin completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1964, he relocated to the United Kingdom and earned a doctorate in physiological psychology from University College London in 1968.
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Academic career
From 1965 to 1972, Plotkin worked as a research scientist at the Medical Research Council. He spent two years (1970–1972) as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Upon returning to the UK, he joined University College London as a lecturer. He was promoted to Reader in 1988 and became a professor in 1993. He was head of the Psychology Department at UCL from 1993 to 1998 and was named Emeritus Professor in 2005.
His doctoral students include Kevin Lala and Cecilia Heyes.
Contributions
- Evolutionary Psychology: Plotkin's work helped establish the field of evolutionary psychology with accessible overviews like "Evolution in Mind" that explained how natural selection shaped the human mind. Plotkin applied evolutionary principles to psychological topics like learning, intelligence, and memory.
- Cultural Evolution: Plotkin wrote extensively on evolution and culture. In "The Imagined World Made Real," Plotkin brought an evolutionary approach to analyzing culture, arguing it evolves through Darwinian mechanisms. This helped start the study of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution as scientific disciplines.
- Behavior's Role in Evolution: Plotkin's book "The Role of Behavior in Evolution" underscored how behavior is not just an evolutionary outcome, but a key driver shaping trajectories. This work influenced later research emphasizing animal agency in evolution through niche construction.
- Evolutionary Epistemology: Plotkin pioneered the field of evolutionary epistemology, which analyzes the growth of knowledge from a Darwinian perspective. In his "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge", he proposed modeling the mind as a Darwin machine that accumulates knowledge via evolutionary processes of variation, selection, and retention.