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Laura Betzig studies despotism and democracy in history. She's looked at the cross cultural record; done fieldwork in Micronesia on Ifaluk and Yap; and read ancient, medieval and modern history. She's written over a hundred scientific and scholarly articles, on subjects from sex in the Old Testament, to competition among Roman emperors and Pan troglodytes, to the persecution of Christians, to causes of the English Revolution. And she's published 3 books: Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History; Human Reproductive Behavior: A Darwinian Perspective; and Human Nature: A Critical Reader. She's spent the last couple of decades at work on The Badge of Lost Innocence, a history of the West. Betzig has a B.A. from the University of Michigan
in psychology, Laura's daughter Alexa, MIT '07, Harvard '11,
develops targeted cancer therapies for a biotech
in Cambridge; her son Max, Booth '22, Carnegie
Mellon '11, led his soccer team to consecutive
NCAA tournament berths, and now works in a Chicago
bank. Laura and her husband of 35 years, the MD
and anthropologist Paul Turke, live together near
Ann Arbor, on Strawberry Lake. Contact: |
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and a Ph.D. in anthropology from
Northwestern University. She's held research and
teaching positions at Northwestern, the University
of California and the University of Michigan in
anthropology, psychology and zoology; and has
lectured in departments of anthropology, biology,
economics, philosophy, psychology and medieval
history. She's done TV in the US and Canada, the
Netherlands and the UK; and her work has been
written up in newspapers and magazines like Time,
The Sunday Times, The
Economist, The Washington Post, The
Atlantic, Politico, Slate, The
Huffington Post, Discover, Smithsonian,
New Scientist, and US News
& World Report. She's contributed to
the Annual Question at