Background
Born in Wiltshire, England in 1944, Robin Baker grew up in the small village of Manningford Bruce in the Vale of Pewsey.
Born in Wiltshire, England in 1944, Robin Baker grew up in the small village of Manningford Bruce in the Vale of Pewsey.
Educated at Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School, where thirty years earlier the author William Golding had also been educated, he gained his Bachelor of Science degree (a First Class in Zoology) from the University of Bristol in 1965, where he also gained a doctorate in 1969 under H. East. Hinton, Federal Reserve System (1912–1977). His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was on the evolution of the migratory habit in butterflies and applied for the first time the principles of the new and growing disciplines of behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology to the field of insect migration.
A best-selling author in the field of sexual biology his books have been translated into 27 different languages. These include the international bestseller Sperm Wars which was based on his own lab’s original research on human sexuality. His work and ideas on the evolution of human behaviour have been featured in many radio and television programmes around the world.
This work was subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
He moved to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970 and from there to the University of Manchester in 1974 where he was first a lecturer, and in 1981 a Reader in Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences. In 1996 he left academic life to concentrate on his career in writing and broadcasting.
He currently lives in the foothills of the Sierras in Southern Spain with his family. Academic Work Although his early work was on evolutionary aspects of insect migration and territoriality, his interests broadened.
With Georgia Parker and V.G.F. Smith in 1972, he proposed a leading theory for the evolution of anisogamy and two sexes and in 1979, with Georgia Parker he proposed the Unprofitable Prey Theory of the evolution of bird coloration.
In 1978 in his book The Evolutionary Ecology of Animal Migration he wrote for the first time on the theme that permeated his work for the rest of his academic life: the application of the principles of evolutionary biology to the behaviour of humans. This led in the 1980s to controversial work on the role of magnetoreception in the navigation of humans, and in the 1990s (with Mark Bellis) to a study of sperm competition in humans and rats, including proposal of the kamikaze sperm hypothesis. Baker and Bellis’ research into the evolutionary biology of infidelity, masturbation, sperm polymorphism, and sperm number in humans, as well as into the design and function of the human penis and cervix led to a number of scientific papers and an academic book: Human Sperm Competition: copulation, masturbation and infidelity.