Robert Wright is the bestselling American author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv.
Robert Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, into a Southern Baptist family. He attended public secondary schools in San Francisco, California, and San Antonio, Texas. After attending Texas Christian University for a year in the late 1970s, Wright transferred to Princeton University to study sociobiology, a precursor to evolutionary psychology.
Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (1988), was influenced by his Princeton teachers, including John McPhee.
He has published four more books: The Moral Animal (1994), Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), The Evolution of God (2009), and Why Buddhism is True (2017).
Wright is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A contributing editor at The New Republic, he has also written for Time, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.
Robert Wright has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania and is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
His most recent position was as Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 2019.
Besides teaching, lecturing, writing, and journalism, Wright has pioneered online content creation. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv and Meaningoflife.tv, the founder and chief correspondent of the Nonzero Newsletter and Nonzero Podcast, and the creator of the Nonzero Foundation.
Robert Wright lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Lisa and two daughters.
Photo credit: Barry Munger