About me

 

Don't read this-- go back to reading about some great literature! Life is short, you have no time to read about every webmaster that ever read a book.

 

I was born in 1971, grew up in Leominster, Massachusetts, went to Gordon College as a biology and history major, and then got married to my college sweetheart, April, in 1994. I took two years off from school. For one year I worked as a naturalist and caretaker for the Trustees of Reservations of Massachusetts, a private land trust organization. For the second year I taught high school in Maine. April and I were married by then, and living in a cabin on Sebago Lake, Maine. I was planning to go to graduate school in philosophy, and then biology, but had not yet taken more than a couple of introductory philosophy courses. So I read a lot of philosophy during that year, in preparation. April and I then flew to England, and we lived at Oxford from 1995 till 1997. I wrote a PhD dissertation there in moral philosophy and the philosophy of science, inquiring into the history and nature of our moral views.  I offered a critique of the tendency for philosophers to use a scientific perspective to determine our basis for deciding something is right and wrong. It's not that I think science cannot contribute to ethics or morality. It is just that philosophers seem to have science-envy sometimes, wishing that all of their conclusions were available to anyone willing to do a bit of observation and analytical thought. On the contrary, I think morality is one of those things, like beauty and love, that can be described to some degree but never completely by science. The remainder of the inquiry into these things is up to the imagination and experience of individual people. What is right and wrong will never, I believe, be codified in a scientific way because science is public and some things are inherently private.

 

In the fall of 1997 I enrolled at the University of Michigan in their ecology and evolutionary biology PhD program. I worked on two main projects there. First, I continued the thread I had begun in philosophy, but in the opposite direction, by inquiring into the ways in which evolutionary biology can illuminate our understanding of human nature, morality, and religion. My dissertation, however, fell under the disciplines of animal behavior, ornithology, and evolution. I primarily studied African weaverbirds, a family of birds (Ploceidae) I came to love during several field seasons spent with them-- in West Africa, South Africa, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. I found them a very good study organism for several interests of mine: invasive species, brood parasitism, coevolution, and rapid evolution. I found that egg color evolved very rapidly when the African village weaver Ploceus cucullatus was introduced by humans into new habitats, and wrote my dissertation primarily about my experimental and observational studies of that evolution. After receiving my degree from Michigan, I returned to Massachusetts as a Darwin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, where I have been since 2003.  I am now researching how birds learn their songs, under a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health.

 

April has been working at the various places we've lived over the past few years, most significantly at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and NSF International in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is interested in animal welfare, calligraphy, and photography, and sells beautiful photographs of natural and cultural subjects (see her work at Eidolonphoto.com). She quit her regular job to accompany me as my research associate on all of my weaver bird field seasons. As soon as the malaria prophylactic wore off, we decided to have children. In April of 2002 we had Eva, and in November of 2003 Elias. All four of us currently live in Belchertown, just outside of Amherst, Massachusetts. 

 

My acquaintance with literature never had a specific beginning. I can remember reading Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and Kipling's stories ever since I was a child, and my high school years were spent in a failed attempt to find something to rival J. R. R. Tolkien. My records of reflections and thoughts on what I read began in college. Frankly, I was disappointed at my poor recall of the many classic works we were assigned to read in high school. I read Elie Wiesel's Night again, for instance, and was surprised that I could read so potent of a book the second time, and have it be almost as new to me as the first. And I remembered wishing that I could contain the whole of the Iliad in my head, to access for entertainment when I was waiting for a bus or the dentist. So I began to take notes on what I read, in the hope that I would never again read something good without preserving it in my memory somehow, even if I needed a mnemonic aid to bring it back. I also hoped to write essays later in life, and planned for these notes to help me draw liberally from the minds of others throughout history. In 1999 I decided to edit what I had so far of these notes, and publish them to the web. This has grown into Reflections on Great Literature.