Henry Plotkin

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Plotkin completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.^[1] In 1964, he relocated to the United Kingdom and earned a doctorate in physiological psychology from University College London in 1968.^[1]

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^[3] and was named Emeritus Professor in 2005.

His doctoral students include Kevin Lala and Cecilia Heyes.^{[citation needed]}

• 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.^[4] Plotkin applied evolutionary principles to psychological topics like learning, intelligence, and memory.
• Cultural Evolution: Plotkin wrote extensively on evolution and culture.^[5][6][7][8] In "The Imagined World Made Real," Plotkin brought an evolutionary approach to analyzing culture, arguing it evolves through Darwinian mechanisms.^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[12]