Mary E. Clark - Keynote speaker
A brief biography and history of In Search of Human Nature
Mary E. Clark
I am a biologist (University of California, Berkeley, AB, MA, PhD) by training, lived in the United Kingdom from 1956-67 and did research at the University of Bristol. Also had many professional connections in Sweden, France and Low Countries. On my return to the states, I obtained a faculty position at San Diego State University, 1969-1989. While there I wrote an introductory biology text ("Contemporary Biology, " W.B. Saunders, 1973, 1979) that was the first to incorporate applications of biological knowledge to practical daily life: How alcohol affects liver cells; drugs, the brain; smog, chloroplasts and human lungs; how dialysis machines work; how contraceptives work… and so on. The first edition sold over 125,000 copies; by the second edition, all other introductory texts had the same material in them.
In 1981, I was named the first national Professor of the Year (USA) by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (Washington, DC). I also served as Section G (Biology) Chair, and was involved in generating two, four-session conferences at the annual meeting, one on Sociobiology and one on Recombinant DNA, both highly controversial topics at that time. I am a Fellow of AAAS, and have served on two national commissions, one for AAAS, Project 2061, about what all high school graduates should know about science; the other for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, To Secure the Blessings of Liberty (on the Role and Future of State Colleges and Universities).
In the early 1980s, I put together a course on the planetary future - called Our Global Future - that was extremely eclectic and multidisciplinary with up to 12 or 13 different faculty lecturing in one semester, from physicists to theologians, from biologists to social scientists and business management types. (It is still being taught). In 1982 I began work on a text, Ariadne's Thread: The Search for New Modes of Thinking (1989, Macmillan, London and St. Martin's, New York.)
In 1989, I catalyzed a group of faculty from SDSU, UCSD, USD and two local community colleges to sponsor a national interdisciplinary conference in San Diego called "Rethinking the Curriculum," at which such diverse persons as Huston Smith, Frances Moore Lappe, Hazel Henderson, Ernest Boyer, Johann Galtung, Mary Midgley, and some fourteen others spoke on central issues in education for the future. The plenary lectures were edited by me and a dedicated colleague, Dr. Sandra A. Wawrytko, under the same title (Greenwood Press, 1990).
Meantime, the MS of "Ariadne" aroused interest in several quarters and in 1990, the faculty of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia offered me an endowed chair. For two years, I taught conflict resolution to masters and doctoral students (while simultaneously discovering the pluses and minuses of the social sciences qua science.) It was while there that I realized clearly how vague was the understanding of instrinsic human nature among faculty colleagues and students, alike - and, as a biologist cum conflict resolver, set about developing the present book. The basic skeleton was already present, but not the myriads of details. Altogether, I have been working on it for over eight years, putting it through three major revisions.
The several revisions have been read by various specialists in each area, plus by friends and colleagues. I have tried to balance documentation with readability, facts with anecdotes and concrete narrative examples. In the fall of 2001 a pair of faculty friends at Denison University in Ohio (where I once taught for a semester as visiting professor) used several chapters in a course in comparative anthropology/psychology, and the students were enthusiastic, even when they disagreed with what I said. They preferred it, I am told, to Jared Diamond's well-known "Guns, Germs, and Steel," also assigned. Since then, it has been received enthusiastically by students at Evergreen State in Olympia, WA (course on "Nature, Nurture, or Nonsense"), and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, where students take turns putting on the "Mary Clark hat" when they want to make a point they think I might make if I were there.
A final comment about its content and title. The intended audience is broadly-based: educated members of the public, college students, and all those concerned with global change. Its original (my preferred) title was "Who Do We Think We Are?", which is much more provocative than the bland "In Search of Human Nature" that the more conservative editor at Routledge and I finally agreed on. So far, everyone who has read it has been enthusiastic, saying "It's so needed!"