About the Author

I have spent most of my professional life as a software engineer, but with a resume that causes head hunters' brows to furrow. I have a PhD in social science with an emphasis in mathematical behavioral science. I am also a maker, a part-time worm farmer, and an essayist. This collection of vocations causes a variety of reactions among the people I meet, but each activity rewards the same habit: looking closely at what a system does and asking what must be happening underneath.

My time in the social sciences included a year in Paul Ekman’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, where I learned the Facial Action Coding System developed by Ekman and Wallace Friesen. FACS provides a disciplined way to describe visible facial movements. A raised inner brow, tightened eyelid, or compressed lip is a small event, but it may carry information about a process that cannot be observed directly. FACS eventually escaped the psychology laboratory and became part of the technical infrastructure of film and animation, and became especially important in photoreal performance capture and digital-character work in films like Avatar and Benjamin Button.

That way of looking stayed with me. Many systems produce the equivalent of facial movements. Biological systems do. Cognitive, social, economic, and technological systems do as well. A small behavior, recurring failure, unusual constraint, or missing capability may reveal an underlying mechanism long before the system as a whole becomes visible.

Software engineering strengthened the same instinct from another direction. Programs are elaborate arrangements of assumptions, dependencies, permissions, state changes, and failure modes. When something goes wrong, the visible symptom may appear nowhere near the mechanism producing it. Finding the cause requires moving carefully from what the system did to what its behavior permits us to infer.

Making things keeps that reasoning honest. Wood, metal, plastic, heat, water, microorganisms, and worms are indifferent to a persuasive explanation that does not work. They expose the difference between what should happen in an abstract model and what the materials will actually permit. I find that useful.

The subjects I write about range widely: cognition, language, animal behavior, technology, craft, political economy, civilization, and the Fermi paradox, among others. I compare humans with other species when the comparison clarifies what we share and where the differences begin. I am not above treating a viral video of a chimp responding to a magic trick as a behavioral observation worth examining if it helps clarify which cognitive capacities humans share with other primates.

Across those subjects, I keep returning to a related set of questions. How do living systems organize information and construct usable representations of their worlds? How do those representations move between organisms, accumulate across generations, and become embedded in tools, practices, markets, and institutions? What do the resulting structures make possible, and what do they prevent their inhabitants from seeing?

I use bio-ontology as a name for that territory. The essays do not belong to one conventional discipline, and they do not all argue for one theory. They share a method: begin with something concrete, stay with its peculiarities, separate concepts that have been bundled together, and look for the mechanism beneath the observation. Sometimes the starting point is a medieval sword, a line of software, a dog holding a leash, a twelve-dollar T-shirt, or a five-legged interstellar rock spider. The object changes. The way of looking does not.

Writing is how I make those observations available to another mind. I try to preserve the strangeness of the thing while making its structure more legible, and to leave uncertainty intact wherever the evidence requires it.

Joel