Robert Wright (journalist)

Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma to a Southern Baptist[2] family and raised in (among other places) San Francisco. A self-described "Army brat",[3] 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.[2] 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.

Wright has written extensively on the topic of religion, particularly in The Evolution of God. In 2009, When asked by Bill Moyers if God is a figment of the human imagination, Wright responded:[21]

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.

On The Colbert Report, Wright said he was "not an atheist" but did not believe in any of the three Abrahamic religions.[22] He 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,[23] in the context of teleology.[24] 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.[25]

Wright has also been critical of organized atheism and describes himself more specifically as a secular humanist.[26] 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 organized atheism 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.[27]

In Why Buddhism is True, Wright advocates a secular, Westernized form of Buddhism focusing on the practice of mindfulness meditation and stripped of supernatural beliefs such as reincarnation.[28] He believes Buddhism's diagnosis of the causes of human suffering is vindicated by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.[29] He further argues that the modern psychological idea of the modularity of mind resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (anatman).[29]

Wright lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Lisa and their two daughters.[3] They have two dogs named Frazier[30] and Milo,[31] who are featured in a few Bloggingheads.tv episodes.

• 1989 Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. ISBN 0-06-097257-2
• 1994 The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. ISBN 0-679-76399-6
• 1999 Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. ISBN 0-679-75894-1
• 2009 The Evolution of God. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-73491-8
• 2017 Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. ISBN 1439195455

• The Evolution of God was one of three finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.[32]
• The New York Times Book Review chose Wright's The Moral Animal as one of the 10 best books of 1994;[33] it was a national bestseller and has been published in 12 languages.
• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny was a The New York Times Book Review Notable Book in the year 2000 and has been published in nine languages. Fortune magazine included Nonzero on a list of "the 75 smartest [business-related] books of all time."[34]
• Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was published in 1988 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.[35]
• Wright's column "The Information Age," written for The Sciences magazine, won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism.

• Robert Wright on Twitter
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• EvolutionofGod.net - A website for Wright's book, The Evolution of God
• Nonzero.org - A website for Wright's book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
• MeaningofLife.tv - Wright's website recording his interviews of noted philosophers and scientists including Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Smith, Steven Pinker, John Polkinghorne, and Francis Fukuyama
• Contributions to Slate magazine