About the Archive

This archive attempts to include all of my published work and online material, spanning nearly fifty years. PDFs of my academic articles are downloadable, subject to copyright restrictions. My two most recent books, Atlas Hugged (a novel) and A Life Informed by Evolution (an autobiographical reflection), are available only on this website, where they are gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in return, with all proceeds going to my nonprofit organization Prosocial.World.

The archive is worthy of your attention, and my effort to create it, for three reasons.

1) My career is part of a history of intellectual thought that began with the scientific revolution and is still in progress. This means that the near future can be different and better than the present because of changes in the ways we think about the world.

2) I contributed to this history by helping to revive a view of evolution called Multilevel Selection (MLS) theory, which was widely rejected fifty years ago. Thanks to MLS theory, we can now begin to think about society as an organism in its own right, rather than just as a collection of self-interested individuals. This is the shift in thinking that can make our lives different and better in the near future.

3) My work is notable for the diversity of topics I have covered, not as an amateur, but by contributing to the peer-reviewed literature – the gold standard of professional accomplishment in the academic world. Judging by peer-reviewed publications, if anyone qualifies as a polymath, it is me. This is due to one primary reason: My work is richly informed by evolution. My personal attributes are secondary to this primary reason.

My memoir, A Life Informed by Evolution, recounts how a mediocre student and son of a famous novelist first became an aquatic ecologist and then — thanks to evolutionary theory – became a parasitologist, entomologist, ornithologist, philosopher and human behavioral scientist, religious scholar, educator, activist, contextual behavioral scientist, economist, complex systems theorist, worldwide change agent, journalist, a more spiritual person, and back to my roots as a novelist.

As a journalist, the beat that I cover includes “anything and everything from an evolutionary perspective.” A small sample includes Greek democracy, the nature of fiction and the arts, entrepreneurship, world history, rethinking whole disciplines, morality, systems engineering, smart cities, business, religion, humanism, atheism, the Freemasons, toxic leadership in the US army, the Me Too movement, free speech, pirate societies, fake news, cancer, Galapagos finches, microbial evolution, chicken breeding, Norway, and beaver ecosystems. Many of my journalistic pieces are conversations with top scientists, scholars, philosophers, economists, business leaders, artists, and everyday folks.

How can a single person do all this? My answer is non-egoistic. It is the theory that I learned as a graduate student, at a particular time in history when the theory was proving its explanatory scope. That’s what makes my story and body of work so interesting — because it is about so much more than myself as a person. I am not alone, although the number of people who are similarly informed by evolution is still a tiny fraction of the world population. I firmly believe that when “this view of life” becomes widely shared, we will have both the knowledge and the values to consciously evolve our futures for the global good.