 |
|
The main theme in my writing over the past few books has been the implications of biological thought for human nature and society.
In The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science (Cape 1995 / Vintage 1996), I argued that race remains a persistent presence in science, and showed how biological ideas continue to play their part in beliefs about human differnce.
As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind (Granta 1999) is about trying to imagine radically different beings from ourselves - the beings who came before modern humans and left behind the enigmatic objects known as handaxes. The book reflects upon what we can't know about our predecessors, 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 third in the series was A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination (Faber 2004). It 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.
My most recent book is Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good, (Oxford University Press 2008). As the title implies, it has a happy ending.
There's also Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (Lawrence & Wishart 1992 / Granta 2003), which explores attitudes to sex and race in Britain during the early part of the last century. It pointed me in the direction I subsequently took, and I'm still very fond of it.
I live in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with my wife and son. I'm a fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton, from which I hold a Ph.D.