The Author

John Hewitt is a Yorkshireman, born in 1947 in Bradford, where he grew up. He attended a local grammar school and became an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying natural sciences. After his first degree he obtained a Ph.D. in molecular biology, also in Cambridge, working with the Nobel prizewinner, Max Perutz.

After doing research in Cornell and Stanford Universities, in the USA, and at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, he returned to Cambridge, as part of the academic staff, teaching biochemistry. He is the author of numerous scientific papers in virology as well as molecular and theoretical biology. The Architecture of Thought is his first published book.

Dr. Hewitt has become a fierce critic of the academic community, in particular of the scientific establishment, which (Perutz not included) he often found to be corrupt, unwilling to engage in rational debate, censorious of criticism and dissent and, at times, deliberately deceitful. A description of one instance can be found in his work at A Habit of Lies.

The conflict between scientific deceit, which is actually quite common, and science's claims of rationality, led to Dr. Hewitt's interest in scientific method and philosophy. This interest, in its turn, led to his studying the application of evolutionary theory to epistemology, the theory of knowledge, and hence to his development of the generalized form of evolutionary theory, bioepistemic evolution, described in "The Architecture of Thought." The radical departure underpinning the theory of bioepistemic evolution is that it is based on data, rather than genes, which are treated as a format for the data contained on DNA. The aim of his present work is to describe and develop this form of evolutionary theory particularly its application to our understanding of human nature and origins.

Dr. Hewitt lives in Bedfordshire. He is divorced and raised his son, who is now a young adult.