Lynne Isbell

Isbell has published work on the origin of primates, on predation, food competition, the ecology of social relationships, the evolution of group living, and bipedalism and is the author of an award-winning book, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (2009), which proposes the snake detection theory, largely attributing the advanced evolution of the visual system of primates to the need to detect snakes.

She was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University from 1992 to 1996 and has been at University of California, Davis, since 1996, where she is currently a full professor. Her field of research is primate behavior, ecology, and evolutionary history, with focuses on aspects of food competition, predation, dispersal, and ranging behaviour.

Isbell’s focus on primates came after moving to Davis, California, when she volunteered to work on a year-long behavioral project with captive bonnet macaques. She spent two years in the field at Tom Struhsaker's study site in Uganda before entering graduate school at UC Davis, planning a dissertation on the behavior and ecology of the red colobus monkey, but took the opportunity instead to study vervet monkeys. After fieldwork in the Amboseli National Park, Kenya, she received a PhD from UC Davis in 1990, with a dissertation on "Influences of Predation and Resource Competition on the Social System of Vervet Monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) in Amboseli National Park, Kenya" supervised by Peter Rodman.

Isbell's first academic job was as reader for the class of Meredith Small. She gained her Ph.D. in Animal Behavior from UC Davis in 1990.

As an undergraduate at the University of Redlands, Isbell worked with ungulates, including bongos and desert bighorn sheep, and graduated BA in ethology from Johnston College of the University in 1976.

Isbell grew up in Compton, California. At school, she had the ambition to become a veterinarian, but was inspired to take an interest in primatology by Jane Goodall’s book In the Shadow of Man (1971).

In Black, Brown, and White: Stories Straight Outta Compton, written with two friends from different ethnic backgrounds, Isbell has written about their lives in Compton during the 1960s and early 1970s, the era of the civil rights movement, the Watts riots, and black power. They describe how Compton changed from a mostly white community to a mostly black one that was known as "the Murder Capital of the United States." The title refers to Straight Outta Compton, an album by N.W.A.

Lynne A. Isbell (born 1955) is an American ethologist and primatologist, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis.