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(1945–2024)
Helen Elizabeth Fisher, the biological anthropologist who defined the science of love, died from endometrial cancer at her home in New York City on August 17, 2024. She was 79. Dr. Fisher will be best remembered for her transformational research on love, romance, and sexual attraction, and for the multi-disciplinarity that defined her career. Fisher employed methods and findings from biological anthropology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines to contextualize and illuminate her own research on love in all its forms, attachment, adultery, divorce, and the evolution and future of human family life. She took the phenomenon of love—long dismissed as unscientific—and forged it into a legitimate domain of neuroscience. In so doing, Helen Fisher reconceptualized the convergences between biological anthropology, neuroscience, and human mating behavior. Previously, anthropology regarded attraction and pair-bonding largely as social constructs. Fisher demonstrated that romantic attraction and attachment were biologically encoded through neural pathways that evolved to enable human mating and reproductive behavior.
After completing undergraduate degrees in anthropology and psychology at New York University, Fisher earned an MA. and PhD in physical anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Rather than following a conventional academic path, she steered her work toward the emerging field of social neuroscience, how biological systems and interpersonal dynamics interact to produce “the social mind.”
Among anthropologists, Fisher’s ideas were often seen as controversial because her work transcended the boundary between culture and biology. She challenged the prevailing anthropological paradigm that attributed human behavior primarily to social and cultural factors. While never minimizing their importance, Fisher urged us to recognize that our evolutionary and biological heritage also shape who we are.
Although Fisher maintained a very active academic publishing record throughout her career, she early on sought a larger stage for her ideas. She published six internationally best-selling books and was frequently featured on television programs in the US and abroad, as well as on hundreds of radio shows ranging from local to international. She was named a TED All-Star, with her talks collectively viewed tens of millions of times. For decades she served as an anthropological commentator and consultant for dozens of businesses and contributed columns to O, The Oprah Magazine and a blog for Psychology Today. She was the world’s most quoted person about love and relationships.
Beyond the popular sphere, Dr. Fisher gave hundreds of invited lectures at universities, museums, town halls, and business conferences in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, and Australia on the evolution of human sexuality, romantic love, marriage and divorce, gender differences in the brain and behavior, personality, temperament and mate choice, and the future of men and women in business and family life.
Fisher’s most recent professional roles were as Senior Research Fellow with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, Chief Scientific Advisor to the relationship company Match.com, and Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of NeuroColor. In recognition of her scientific and public achievements, in 1985 she received the American Anthropological Association’s Distinguished Service Award and in 2011 the AAA’s Anthropology in Media Award. That same year she was honored with the Women in Science Award from the London Medical Research Council’s Suffrage Science Project commemorating 100 years of women in science.
Gifts in her memory may be made to the Helen Fisher Distinguished Lecture Fund at the Kinsey Institute: https://knsy.in/HF-lecture.
Carole H. Browner