Robert Wright (journalist)

Robert Wright (born January 15, 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. Additionally, Wright teaches an undergraduate seminar at Princeton University on the connections between modern cognitive science and Buddhism, in addition to an online course on the same subject.

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.