I am currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. I was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia, where the clear night skies helped foster an early love for astronomy. The comets Shoemaker-Levy (1994) and Hale-Bopp (1995) passed through the solar system when I was still young and impressionable, and, in short order, I bought a telescope and adopted Carl Sagan as my intellectual hero. As an undergrad at James Madison University, I founded the Astronomy Club and served as its charter president.

In the spring of 2005, Bill Nye the Science Guy hosted a special on the Science Channel counting down the hundred greatest scientific discoveries of all time. I dutifully tuned in expecting the show to crown Einstein’s general theory of relativity the number-one discovery, and was stunned when Darwin’s theory of natural selection instead topped the list. (You can watch the segment at this link.) I had never previously given any thought to evolution, but I have thought of little else since. I was especially enchanted by the principle of common descent, which holds that all living things on earth are related, that we are all literally blood kin. I found this idea incredibly powerful and I still do, and I resolved to spend the rest of my life exploring evolution and its many implications. I enrolled in the graduate History program at Virginia Tech, where my thesis looked at reactions to the “tree of life” in American classrooms and courtrooms. I later enrolled in the History program at Florida State University, where my dissertation examined the evolutionary consequences of animal domestication. My work was later published as a monograph, Feral Animals in the American South: An Evolutionary History, by Cambridge University Press in 2016. I’ve also published articles/chapters on several different aspects of biology and society, including the intellectual pedigree of America’s most famous living biologist, the fraught development of sociobiology, the conceptual foundations of multilevel selection theory, the evolutionary impact of mining booms (and busts) in the nineteenth-century American West, the cultural legacy of so-called “invasive” species in the twentieth-century American South, and the complex relationship between evolution and ethics.