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RESEARCH INTERESTS
Evolutionary biology
Human ecology
Biological education
In contrast to having a specific area of research, my goal is to understand the basic workings of Life. In other words, I try to figure out how to best unify biology. This may seem an untenable goal in a climate of increasingly specialized research. But my guiding view is that despite the enormous amount of detail that has been discovered, Life's framework is composed of very few relatively simple concepts. The trick is to know what these concepts are and when and how to apply them. I share my insights with students (many of which are introductory students) in hopes that they begin to see how to think about biology.
A particular important aspect of my search has been to identify and then reconcile three observations about Life: (1) Life is old‹that is Life has apparently been continuously present on this planet for the last 3.5 to 3.8 billion years or so. (2) Life is composed of parts (such as organisms, organs, cells, cellular organelles, enzymes, etc.) and each part qualifies as a processor‹an agent of change that converts inputs into different outputs. (3) All processors contribute to their own demise by continual dipping into the available supply of needed inputs and by imposing wear and tear on themselves as they run. These three observations point to Life's fundamental riddle: How can something continue to persist even though the parts that make it up continually fall apart? My answer to this riddle has become the paradigm I use to organize all the various aspects of biology.
I am currently working on a book about my developing perspective of Life. In contrast to a textbook, which tend to be information-based, my goal is to develop a framework that makes the information presented secondary to the ideas that allow one to understand the information. My intended title is "Life is Loopy".
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