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I've written six books and hundreds of articles. They divide into two main themes.
The older one is to do with drugs, their cultural history, and their politics. It really began with my first book, Narcomania: On Heroin (Faber & Faber, 1987, now out of print), and is now based on my second, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Lawrence & Wishart 1992 / Granta 2003), of which I'm very fond.
Since then, I've spent most of my time writing about evolution, biology and society. The first book in this series was The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (Cape 1995 / Vintage 1996), which argued that race remains a persistent presence in science, and that denying it won't make it go away.
Next came As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind (Granta 1999); an unusual kind of science book, for it is largely about what we can't know and how to proceed in its absence. It also contains an argument in favour of evolutionary thinking as an aid to the pursuit of fairness and equality.
The most recently published book, A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination (Faber 2004) explores the idea of adaptation by natural selection, and why there is so much resistance to it. There has been notably less resistance in Britain than in other countries: the book explores the varied responses of a series of British evolutionists to natural selection, so it's a biographical history of British evolutionary thought.
I have recently completed a short book called Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good, which will be published by Oxford University Press in June (UK) and July (USA) 2008.
I'm currently working on another book, for publication in 2009, of which more in due course.
I live in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with my wife and son. I'm a fellow of Brighton's two universities, in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex and in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton.
What I think: an interview with ReadySteadyBook