A Life Informed By Evolution: A Memoir

by David Sloan Wilson

David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of the author Sloan Wilson, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute, and co-founder of the recent spinoff nonprofit Prosocial World.

"I am a scientist and writer who is lucky to be alive during an important period in the history of ideas. When I entered the field of evolutionary biology in the 1970s, it was confined almost entirely to genetic evolution. Everything that evolves was portrayed as a form of selfishness. And evolution was emphatically said to have no purpose. Now, evolution is envisioned as any process that combines the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication—including the fast-paced changes swirling around us (cultural evolution) and within us (our personal evolution). The evolution of goodness can be explained at face value. And human cultural evolution indubitably has an intentional component."

Genres: Science

166 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 19, 2022

About the author

David Sloan Wilson has been a professor of evolutionary biology at Binghamton University for more than twenty years. He has written three academic books on evolution, authored hundreds of papers, some with E.O. Wilson, and his first book for a general audience was Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think.