AUTHOR

Nicholas Wade

Politics & Social Sciences | History | Religion & Spirituality

Nicholas Wade is the author of three books about recent human evolution. They are addressed to the general reader interested in knowing what the evolutionary past tells us about human nature and society today. One, Before the Dawn, published in 2006, traces how people have evolved during the last 50,000 years. The second book, The Faith Instinct (2009), argues that because of the survival advantage of religion, an instinct for religious behavior was favored by natural selection among early human societies and became universal in all their descendants. A Troublesome Inheritance (2014), the third of the trilogy, looks at how human races evolved. Wade was born in Aylesbury, England, and educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences. He became a journalist writing about scientific issues, and has worked at Nature and Science, two weekly scientific magazines, and on the New York Times.