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Randy Thornhill (born 1944) is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist. He is a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and was president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society from 2011 to 2013. He is known for his evolutionary explanation of rape as well as his work on insect mating systems and the parasite-stress theory.
He received a BS in Zoology from Auburn University in 1968, an MS in entomology from Auburn University in 1970, and a PhD in Zoology from the University of Michigan in 1974. His doctoral thesis discussed the evolutionary ecology of Mecoptera insects. He was formerly married to fellow researcher Nancy Thornhill.
Together with anthropologist Craig T. Palmer, Thornhill authored A Natural History of Rape in 2000. Thornhill and Palmer proposed that rape should be understood through evolutionary psychology, and criticized the argument that rape is not sexually motivated. They argue that the capacity for rape is either an adaptation or a byproduct of adaptive traits such as sexual desire and aggressiveness. (2025). 9780878934249, Sinauer Associates, Inc.. ISBN 9780878934249 The work provoked a major controversy. Thornhill received several death threats, and was assigned a campus police officer to escort him to and from class. A compendium of academic criticism was published, to which Thornhill responded.
Since 2005, Thornhill has proposed that many human values evolved to protect against . He believes that morality, political systems and religion are all influenced by regional variations in pathogen levels. In particular, Thornhill and colleagues have suggested that collectivism and xenophobia serve to ward off infectious disease. In support of this, they reported that collectivist cultures had a higher prevalence of pathogens than Individualism ones. Thornhill has also suggested that pathogen defense could help explain civil and ethnic warfare, homicide, patriarchal family structures, and social suppression of female sexuality.
In 2021, Thornhill appeared as a guest on episode 38 of season 4 of the Jordan Peterson Podcast entitled: Death, Disease, and Politics. There, he discussed his research and views with the host (Peterson) about a range of topics, including attractiveness, Thornhill's parasite-stress theory, and the “critical role that Infection plays in humanity, IQ, sex, religion, and conservatism”.
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