Merlin Wilfred Donald (born November 17, 1939) is an emeritus Canadian professor of psychology, neuroanthropology, and cognitive neuroscience, at Case Western Reserve University, and in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is noted for the position that evolutionary processes need to be considered in determining how the mind deals with symbolic information and language. In particular, he suggests that explicit, algorithmic processes (the computational theory of mind) may be inadequate to understanding how the mind works.
He is also known as the proponent of the mimetic theory of speech origins.