From 1972 through 1975, she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto, where she met her future husband, fellow psychologist Martin Daly.[2][4] Together, they moved to Hamilton in 1978 after Daly was hired by McMaster University.[2] In the 1980s, Wilson was appointed professor of Psychology at McMaster, where she remained for the rest of her career.[2]
Wilson died in Hamilton on September 24, 2009, of cancer.[2] In 2009, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society established the Margo Wilson Award (for best paper published in the previous year) to honour her contributions to the field.[5][6]
Research
In 1978, Wilson proposed the idea to Daly that they could analyze patterns of homicide to better understand humans' social behaviours from an evolutionary perspective.[4] For the next 30 years, Wilson and Daly collaborated on this research, authoring several books and over 100 academic papers and book chapters in this area.[7][4]
Their first book on this topic, Homicide (1988),[8] has been described as a "founding"[9] and "classic"[4] text for the field of evolutionary psychology. Their second book on homicide, The truth about Cinderella (1999),[10] summarized their findings on the Cinderella effect, which suggests that stepparents are more likely to mistreat children than biological parents.[11]
↑Surbey, Michele K. (2016), "Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (Founders of Evolutionary Psychology)", in Weekes-Shackelford, Viviana; Shackelford, Todd K.; Weekes-Shackelford, Viviana A. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Springer International Publishing, pp.1–9, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3583-1, ISBN978-3-319-16999-6
