Kevin MacDonald was born in 1944 and raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  He received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1966, where he was involved in radical political movements and had several Jewish roommates -- experiences he reportedly later said opened his eyes to Jewish involvement in radical politics. After attempting a career as a jazz pianist, he went on to earn an M.S. in biology at the University of Connecticut in 1977. He completed his PhD in biobehavioral sciences in 1981, also at the University of Connecticut, where his dissertation focused on the behavioral development of wolves.

MacDonald has taught in the psychology department at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) since 1985. Prior to that, he held teaching positions at universities across the country, working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois and, from 1983-1985, at Connecticut’s Trinity College.

Throughout his career, MacDonald has had advisory positions and has served on the boards for several mainstream groups and journals. In 1995, he began a six-year term as Secretary-Archivist and member of the Executive Council of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which has been described as “the leading professional organization associated with evolutionary psychology.” He also edited the group’s newsletter from 1995 to 2000. From 1999 to 2004, MacDonald edited Population and Environment and, from 1989 to 1994, he was on the Editorial Board of Child Development, a respected publication in the field of developmental psychology.

These and other mainstream publications, including Journal of Behavioral Development, the Journal of Family Psychology, and the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, have featured MacDonald’s work for over 20 years.He also contributed individual chapters to the 2005 book Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development.  He wrote Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis, published in 1988, and edited or co-edited various other works unrelated to Jews, one published as recently as 2004.

During the 1994-1995 academic year, CSULB gave MacDonald the Distinguished Faculty Scholarly and Creative Activities award.  

Also in 1994, MacDonald published his first book on Jews, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. This was followed by Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, both published in 1998. (All three books were published by Praeger Publishers.) In The Culture of Critique, MacDonald announced that the book was to be his last on Jews, and that another book, which he tentatively titled Diaspora Peoples, on the group evolutionary strategies of Sikhs, Assyrians, and other groups, was forthcoming, but that book has yet to appear. In 2004, his Understanding Jewish Influence, a collection of three long essays on Jews, was published by Washington Summit Publishers. Sam Francis, a racist writer, introduced the book, which is probably MacDonald’s most explicitly anti-Semitic book to date. That collection was expanded in 2007 into another book, Cultural Insurrections, and released in 2008 by The Occidental Press, which includes additional essays on Jews, anti-Semitism, and Europeans, among them “Stalin’s Willing Executioners.”