In brief
Gregory M. Cochran is an American physicist and independent researcher specializing in human evolutionary biology and genetics. With a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he has worked as a consultant in adaptive optics and served as an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.
Cochran gained prominence for co-authoring The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009) with Henry Harpending, which argues that the advent of agriculture, urbanization, and cultural practices drove rapid genetic adaptations in human populations over the past ten millennia, countering the notion of largely static post-agricultural evolution. The book synthesizes genetic, archaeological, and historical evidence to explain traits like lactose tolerance and disease resistance as outcomes of selection pressures intensified by civilization.
