Don’t bother looking for me on social media sites; I’m not there, and invitations from such sites are blocked. I am freely available by email, although my response times can be slow.

Main Current Project

What Do Organisms Mean? Toward a Biology Worthy of Life

Molecular biology in general and genetics in particular have been fed to the general public in the form of mechanism, determinism, and intrinsic meaninglessness. It all adds up to a remarkable falsehood, and comes to us in part owing to a disastrous misunderstanding of the long-running dispute about mechanism and vitalism in biology. The real news about molecular biological researches of the past couple of decades is that scientists are rediscovering living creatures as organisms of meaning.

I’m in the midst of writing a series of papers about the revolution now occuring in biology for The New Atlantis. It covers not only genetics, the dramatic new developments in epigenetics, and much else on the molecular scale, but also evolution, where the illusion of meaninglessness has perhaps had its strongest run. You’ll find the complete collection of papers in their latest versions — and with various ways to navigate the content — at the project home page.

[Photo © Ernst Vikne (CC)]

My work on the meaning of organisms is part of a broader project: From Mechanism to a Science of Qualities. The project aims to begin characterizing the terms of a new, qualitative science. Of course, for those scientists who identify with Galileo’s commitment to a strictly quantitative science, which excludes qualities from consideration by definition, the phrase "qualitative science" will sound like a simple contradiction. And yet, in reality, there can be no science that is not qualitative; mere quantity does not give us any material content. Without qualities we have no world to try to understand. And if we must deal with qualities, then it’s far better to be aware of what we’re doing than to smuggle those qualities into our work in an undisciplined fashion.

My latest book is Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines. You will find more information about the book here, and can also read the introduction to the book. In addition, I have, with Craig Holdrege, co-authored Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering, which received an excellent review in the September 2008 issue of Nature Biotechnology. It can be ordered either from the University Press of Kentucky or from The Nature Institute bookstore.

All the chapters from my earlier book, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, are available in full text. There are also collected excerpts from reviewers’ comments (as well as a couple of full-text reviews), and a complete, well-annotated table of contents.

Likewise, the chapters from my two booklets, Extraordinary Lives: Disability and Destiny in a Technological Age, and In the Belly of the Beast: Technology, Nature, and the Human Prospect are available in full text. Much of the content of these booklets was assimilated to Devices of the Soul, mentioned above.

All these book reviews are my doing unless otherwise marked.

Very many of my writings—several hundred articles—have appeared in the online NetFuture newsletter, which I have been producing since 1995. These writings deal with a broad range of social issues relating to computers, technology in general, education, genetics, factory farming, video games, robotics, mechanistic versus holistic science, and much else. They are all accessible via the NetFuture topical index. There are also per-issue indexes for each year, which you can get to from the NetFuture main page.

A few of my articles and book chapters about computers and education have been gathered together in one place.

I also have a collection of miscellaneous papers and addresses, several of them unpublished. These cover diverse topics, including computers in the classroom, orality and literacy in the electronic age, Goethean science, the thought of Owen Barfield, and the limitations of a technological understanding of the human heart.

List of publications and presentations.

Finally, here’s where you’ll find some brief biographical information.