Back

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.


I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

Curiosity-driven research isn't just fun; it led us to develop tools that thousands of scientists use to find meaningful patterns in massive datasets (e.g. www.mapequation.org). 





Separately, I've had the opportunity to be part of the largest collective intellectual effort in human history.

In 2020, the scientific community came together—remotely, by necessity—in response to the COVID pandemic, to understand how this disease spreads and what that it does to people, to find of returning life to a semblance of normal amidst a pandemic, to develop a vaccine in record time.

And I've been able to teach 1000s of students. I've written a popular textbook about evolution; developed a class and book about critical thinking that is used around the world; and most recently launched a humanities course about LLMs that will be taught at scores of schools in the fall.

But right now my job doesn't feel like the best job in the world. 

Targeted attacks on university funding have put every US institution into a severe crisis. As of now, there is no way we will be able to continue doing the biomedical research, the conservation science, etc. that we always have.