David P. Barash

From Philosopedia

David P. Barash (9 January 1946 - )

Barash's website contains the following:

My parents were Canadian, my dad from Montreal and my mom from a small town a hundred miles or so farther north in Quebec, known as Ste. Sophie. (Their parents, in turn, were immigrants from Eastern Europe.) I grew up in New York, specifically Far Rockaway, by the beaches and sand dunes of what was then rural Long Island. I attended Harpur College, State University of New York at Binghamton, and graduated as a biology major in 1966. Then it was off to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1970. For my dissertation, I studied the social behavior and ecology of mountain-dwelling animals known as Olympic marmots. I developed a general theory that explained their unusual degree of social tolerance and integration, by relating their natural history to their high-elevation environments.

After teaching for three years in upstate New York, at the State University at Oneonta, I accepted a position in the Psychology Department at the University of Washington, in 1973, and have been here ever since.

I am gleefully married to Judith Eve Lipton, a psychiatrist who specializes in women's health. Together, we have engaged in quite a bit of antinuclear activism, child-rearing, hiking, riding, arguing, and book-writing. We live on about 10 acres in Redmond, Washington, with four horses, four dogs, four cats, and a three-legged turtle named Trike. My eldest daughter, Eva, lives in New York. Ilona is an MD/Ph.D. student in San Diego, and Nellie, the youngest, is still at home. When she leaves for college, we'll probably get some more animals!

I teach, write and do research at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where I have been in the psychology department since 1973. My work and interests are diverse: I was one of the early contributors to the growth of sociobiology, and I continue to conduct occasional field studies of animal behavior, especially the evolution and ecology of social systems among free-living animals, notably mountain-dwelling species such as marmots and pikas. At the same time, much of my attention has recently been directed to understanding the underlying evolutionary factors influencing human behavior, a discipline sometimes called "evolutionary psychology." And finally, since the early 1980s I have been active in researching, promoting, and practicing the field of Peace Studies.

I feel that these issues - animal behavior, evolutionary psychology and Peace Studies - are fundamentally linked, especially since they all involve questions of how biology affects behavior, including male-female differences, reproductive strategies, and the troubling problem of violence in living things generally. I also have a long-standing interest in philosophical matters, notably Buddhism and existentialism, and their connection to each other and to the question of "life's meaning."

My most recent book - coauthored with my daughter, Nell, a student at Swarthmore College - is Madame Bovary's Ovaries: a Darwinian look at literature, published by Delacorte. It is a good-natured, accessible, but nonetheless serious effort to promote the field of "Darwinian literary criticism," which seeks to apply evolutionary science to literature, specifically by showing how our new understanding of human nature can result in a more satisfying understanding of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

The Los Angeles Times (27 June 2005) quoted Barash as follows:

• If God is the designer, and we are created in his image, does that mean he has back problems too? . . . We are profoundly imperfect, cobbled together rather than designed.