What to expect

The purpose of this newsletter is to provide some guidance in evaluating the current scientific evidence on many different issues where biology interfaces with aspects of human nature and welfare. Each piece will deal with a specific issue for which some new information has become available or where an old question can be viewed from a new perspective. For each of these issues and questions, I will try to give a sense of what is fairly certain versus what is still unknown and highly speculative. In other words, I will not provide definite answers about any matter discussed, only relative clarity on what we can reasonably believe and what we yet need to discover.

What I bring to the table

A perfectly reasonable question. Let me try to answer that. I began my professional life with a Ph.D. in Genetics (University of Washington, 1969), on a problem in bacterial physiology and genetics. I then had two postdoctoral fellowships in two different areas, one on the molecular genetics of a virus that infects a bacterium, the other on various aspects of the cell biology of a more complicated organism, a slime mold. In my late 30s, however, I began to doubt the suitability of a career as a research scientist for me. There were aspects of it that did not suit my personality. Nevertheless, I very much wanted to stay involved with matters of biology. I have always loved reading and thinking about living things and the questions they raise, and have since childhood. So, I turned to book writing and scientific editorial work. For nearly 25 years, I was involved with a broad-ranging biology review journal, BioEssays, first as the deputy editor, then as the editor. In that quarter century, I corresponded with thousands of biologists about their articles, which ranged in subject matter from bacterial metabolism and genetics to the roots of human consciousness, trying to help them make their arguments more effectively. I have also written and published four biology books, on a range of subjects, and am completing a fifth, plus about 150 articles, many of them discussion articles on different biological topics. Hence, my “career”, such as it is, has featured breadth rather than specialist depth, though I hope to have brought sufficient expertise and depth to each topic tackled to do it justice.

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