13Wham: November 17th 2009
Colbert Report: December 4th 2008
| Nicholas Wade | |
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- About Nicholas Wade
I’ve worked on the news sections of Nature and Science, two well known scientific journals, and then on the New York Times, where I’ve been an editorial writer, and later editor and reporter for the science section. Besides newspaper work, I have written seven books.
I was born in Aylesbury, a rural town in the English county of Buckinghamshire, and educated at Eton and Kings College, Cambridge, both medieval institutions founded by Henry VI in the 15th century. At Eton, my high school, the educational program was centered on composing iambics, a form of ancient Greek verse, on the assumption that students who mastered so absurd an accomplishment would find it much easier to acquire any knowledge of actual use in the real world.
I studied science in college, but not with any intention of becoming a scientist. So it wasn’t so surprising that I found myself writing about science. Researchers spend years becoming adept in a single field, but writers can glide from one discovery to the next and so get to enjoy science in a different and certainly easier way. I’ve written books on the social aspects of science, including its competitive side (The Nobel Duel) and the persistent presence of fraud in science (Betrayers of the Truth, co-authored with William Broad). Since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, I’ve turned to exploring the evolutionary insights that can now be gleaned into human origins and behavior.
The genome is packed with information about the human past. It provided a new framework, it seemed to me, for integrating all the different disciplines that bear on human origins and behavior, from archaeology to historical linguistics. My book Before the Dawn offers a rounded look at human prehistory from 50,000 years ago with a breadth that is not available elsewhere.
In writing Before the Dawn it became clear to me that religion had played a leading role in early human societies and that new research made it possible to re-examining the evolutionary origin of religious behavior. The result is The Faith Instinct, a book whose subject matter surprised me a lot as I wrote it. I found many unexpected connections and reached conclusions I had not anticipated. If a book is a surprise to its author, it may hold something of interest to readers too, or so I hope.
