Robert Wright (journalist)

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Robert Wright (journalist) bigraphy, stories - American writer

Robert Wright (journalist) : biography

1957 –

Robert Wright (born 1957) is an American journalist, scholar, and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including The Evolution of God, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv. He is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a think tank that has been described as radical centrist in orientation.Morin, Richard; Deane, Claudia (10 December 2001). "Big Thinker. Ted Halstead’s New America Foundation Has It All: Money, Brains and Buzz". The Washington Post, Style section, p. 1.

Books

  • Wright, Robert (1989) Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-097257-2
  • Wright, Robert (1994) The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-76399-6
  • Wright, Robert (2001) Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-75894-1
  • Wright, Robert (2009) The Evolution of God. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-73491-8

Journalism career

Wright served as a Senior Editor at The Sciences and at The New Republic, and as an editor at The Wilson Quarterly. He has been a contributing editor at The New Republic (where he also co-authored the "TRB" column), Time, and Slate, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He contributes frequently to The New York Times, including a stint as guest columnist for the month of April, 2007 and as a contributor to The Opinionator, a web-only opinion page in 2010.

In late November 2011, The Atlantic announced that Wright had been named a senior editor effective January 1, 2012.

Religion

Wright has written extensively on the topic of religion, predominately in his latest book The Evolution of God. In 2009, When asked by Bill Moyers if God is a figment of the human imagination, Wright responds: "I would say so. Now, I don’t think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about God have evolved people have moved closer to something that may be the truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning… Very early on, apparently people started imagining sources of causality. Imagining things out there making things happen. And early on there were shamans who had mystical experiences that even today a Buddhist monk would say were valid forms of apprehension of the divine or something. But by and large I think people were making up stories that would help them control the world."

Wright described himself as agnostic when he appeared on The Colbert Report, and opposes creationism, including intelligent design. Wright has a strictly materialist conception of natural selection; however, he does not deny the possibility of some larger purpose unfolding, that natural selection could itself be the product of design, in the context of teleology. Wright describes what he calls the "changing moods of God", arguing that religion is adaptable and based on the political, economic and social circumstances of the culture, rather than strictly scriptural interpretation.

Wright has also been critical of New Atheism and describes himself more specifically as a secular humanist. Wright makes a distinction between religion being "wrong" and "bad" and is hesitant to agree that its bad effects greatly outweigh its good effects. He sees the new Atheists as attempting to actively convert people in the same way as many religions do. Wright views it as being counterproductive to think of religion as being the root cause of today’s problems.

Life and Education

Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma to a Southern Baptist family and raised in (among other places) San Francisco. A self-described "Army brat", Wright attended Texas Christian University for a year in the late 1970s, before transferring to Princeton University to study Sociobiology, which was a precursor to Evolutionary Psychology. His professors at college included author John McPhee, whose style influenced Wright’s first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information.