PROLOGUE: THE TRUTH ABOUT DARWIN — AND US
DAVID LOYE

Long before I became a systems scientist and evolution theorist myself, I was a journalist and investigative reporter. I was, in fact, one of the earliest handful of television newsmen who set out after World War II inspired by the tradition of getting at the “story behind the story” being established by the great Edward R. Murrow in the days of television’s pioneering. On a much smaller scale, I did the kind of “on the road” feature Charles Kuralt later became famous for.

One of the main things a good journalist learns early on is to question the word of authority. No matter who says it, double-check it. Nose around behind the scenes for what others are saying. Put it all together and come up with the real story.

But the times changed, my needs changed, and during my years of a deepening involvement with science and climbing the ladder toward a professorship I put that earlier life behind me. But then the trouble began. From being fresh to science and academia, from having to learn so much that was new, wanting to get it right and make no waves, I was for more years than I care to remember under pressure to ignore what one might call the sixth sense of the fourth estate, or the aginbite of the six o’clock news.

Wherever my interests strayed from the new career I was building in psychology into all the other areas of science that systems science explores I kept bumping up against it. Something unsettling, off balance, out of alignment like a back in need of a chiropractor.

Many others saw it too. Indeed, I came to see it had been a leit motif for science throughout the 20th century but cumulatively ignored as the perceptions wavered and varied. It was like in a mystery story where the focus keeps shifting as the author plays a guessing game with the reader as to the identity of the real killer.

Finally I could take it no longer. Putting aside the interest in moral development that had become my driving passion in research, as well as other books underway, for much of a decade I reverted to my earlier identity to probe as both scientist and news hound behind what we have been told for a century about Darwin, his theory of evolution, and what Darwin’s theory supposedly tells us about ourselves.

What was the real story behind all these books about the sacrifice of millions of fruit flies, of naked apes and naked mole rats, of selfish genes, memes, mystifying mathematics, and TIT for TAT? What did this heady flurry of sacred names for the supposedly super-Darwinian new faith of sociobiology morphed into evolutionary psychology signify? Hamilton, Trivers, Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, and like something out of an old P.G. Wodehouse book along with Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle, the latest, Pinker— it was like the required daily reading of one’s rosary in book after book.

Beyond question work of great historic importance was done by the earlier neoDarwinians, or Neos. Work of much significance also goes on behind the excesses of these Super-Neos who were their successors. But for the Super-Neos too much of what they say and do seemed the atrocious apotheosis of what has been decried as disjointed and off balance in Darwinian dogma by thousands of open-minded and venturesome scientists over the century. Why now in book after book did this new clique of self-proclaimed Darwinians act like everybody else in the great wide world of science was either stupid or foolishly out of step with them? And why this pose of being the noble Horatio at the bridge outnumbered on all sides by enemies when they had taken over so much of the worlds of academia and publishing? For by the turn of the 20th into the 21st century most of the books, and television programs, and space in newspapers or magazines to reach out beyond science to the citizen— upon whom the fate of democracy, if not evolution itself, depends— was being sopped up either by the Super-Neos or the Creationists.

Particularly repellent to me as a newsman back in the days of blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy was the difference between the modesty and respect for others that was a primary characteristic of the man they claimed for their patron saint, Charles Darwin, and the arrogance and the tone and content of the vituperation many of the Super-Neos and their followers reveled in. Labeling the late Stephen Jay Gould a Marxist was not only a routine favorite pastime they shared with the rightist mindset, but Gould was treated in print as though he was less than the dirt beneath their feet. Worst of all, however, I found, was how the Super-Neo “debate” was being used by a handful of the Super-Neo super-stars and their publishers to transform science into another commodity, like the hotdog concession for a football game, while in the real world beyond academic glitz evolution was literally becoming a question of life or death for millions of us, if not indeed for our species.

What behind this charade was the truth about human evolution? Who really are we? How did we become so much less than we have dreamed of? With nuclear overkill, terrorists, and potential environmental wipeout closing in on us from all sides, most vitally where are we headed ? And what are our chances to make it?

Much as an archeologist does in pursuit of the clues, I began to dig down layer by layer in search of what I sensed was a lost world buried somewhere there beneath the modern rubbish. After what at times seemed the labor of the damned, doomed never to be published, I found behind the theory and story of Charles Darwin as it has been told and sold to us for more than a century something that at first was impossible to believe. But digging behind scenes in the old way for the journalist, as well as the document-and-triple-check-it way of the scientist, has given me what this book is about.

For I did indeed find a lost world. Deep down beneath and back in time from the picture we have of Darwin, of evolution, and of ourselves today I found the full, completed, unedited and unvarnished theory and story as Darwin actually originally wrote them out— not to confuse and cut us off from our true evolutionary path, as became the bewildering and time-wasting course of what happened to our species for over a century. Instead I found what, out of a deep love and caring for life in all its wondrous forms, he wrote out at length wanting to best outfit us for the journey to a better world.


The Old Story and the New Story

As most of us know either from high school or college, Charles Darwin wrote two major books about evolution. The Origin of Species, which became popularized as somehow involving “selfish genes” and a “blind watchmaker,” was about the grim and often bloody crunch of natural selection on variation. Then came The Descent of Man. Where Origin had been confined to prehuman life, Descent was supposed to tell us what we needed to know and teach about what happened at our level of emergence—or the expectations and dynamics of human evolution. In other words, this was the presumably valuable guide to the ins and outs of life at our level that all over the world the dedicated teacher was supposed to automatically direct the inquiring student to. And what were we told was in it?

As few of us ever read Descent, we assumed from the message of Darwinian authority that it must be mainly about “survival of the fittest” and how our species, fiercely competitive and naturally violent, is mainly driven by selfishness to tromp over the rights of others, trash the planet, and seize everything possible for ourselves even when we are pretending to be good.

However repellent the idea, we mainly accepted it without question, for wasn’t this also the underlying lesson of the history of our species as by rote we ourselves were taught and expected to teach it? Wasn’t this the message of that list of dates for the wars we were to memorize and all the land grabs of dynasties that supposedly advanced civilization?

What thoroughly unsettled me when it finally sank in was to find that this was not only the story but also the theory of human evolution that under the banner of Darwinism prevailed for mainstream science as well as mainstream scholarship not just for a little while, or only here and there. Digging down bit by bit and layer by layer, I finally came to see that for most of us this was it almost wall to wall throughout the whole of the 20th century!

Among ourselves, we scientists and other scholars—as I came to know through conference after conference and the rattling battle of articles in journals— widely disagreed and argued about the fine points to this theory. Some of us saw “higher” alternatives, some saw “lower” alternatives, many even discarded Darwin entirely. But beyond this cherished and often jolly discourse, unnoticed by us as we merrily argued on and on, was the drop in temperature and the gathering of the wind for a social hurricane. What we didn’t see was that as far as we the people were concerned, what absorbed we the scientists and the scholars were only wordy “head trips” for reprints in the tiny print that we the people did not read and wordy symposiums we did not attend.

What mattered in our lives—and this with the devastating consequences I came to see and will get to in this book— was the central Darwinian story line of life as basically this brutal and fearful business of survival of the fittest above all else driven by selfishness.

This was supposedly the experts’ message backed by unquestionable authority we first encountered in grade school or high school biology in the tidy miniature. It began, for example, with the seemingly innocuous “unit” in which Mr. Bixby or Miss Gilmore explained how natural selection produced the variety of finches on Galapagos or the eye of a frog. Pursuing the trail through the educational system I saw how this intriguing experience had become the legitimizing toehold in the mind for what was pumped up to the next stage by the authors of textbooks, the popular writers and discussions of books on evolution, even the bloody “classics” we were assigned to read. Again and again we were confronted with the logical implications of the Darwinian shaping of finch and frog for human evolution— i.e., the picture of ours as a species not only similarly shaped by natural selection but also most basically driven by the brutalizing impact of the “principle” of survival-of-the fittest.

Then along came the movies and television and the incredible power of the media world I knew so well from having been there and done it. Pumped up to the next stage by a voracious technology that now not only reached into but often effectively possessed the minds within multi-millions of homes, this became the gory story line that via the Darwinian game show (e.g., Survivor, Survivor II, The Weakest Link, The Fear Factor, Greed, Dog Eat Dog for the 2002 season alone), plus the celebration of gangsters, swindlers, and killing in ever more horrible and ingenious ways, was being spread around the world with a bloody new mind-binding power. Worldwide fearfully welding mind to mind, this is the bedrock vision of who we and the neighbors really are that millions of students have generation after generation dutifully learned to pass on to their children and students when they themselves grew up to become parents and teachers.

Psychologically, this was the Darwinian “social foot print” with the impact of the tromp of a King Kong amid the villagers of mass mind. Politically and economically this was the disturbance that from a tiny funnel along the horizon became the invisible tornado that I came to see laid waste to earlier hopes for the 20th century. Because of how false it was to what both Darwin and the best of his successors had actually written out for all to see and heed, I decided to call this force that warped our history and diverted evolution the paradigm of PseudoDarwinian Mind. This we’ll probe in this book looking for ways to cut it loose and put it behind us.

And what was and is Darwin’s truth—that is, the true theory and the true story of human evolution? It took me more than two decades of work beyond my news days to gain the learning and experience one had to have to know how to dig up and piece it together. I also had to pile up the credentials needed to gain publication for what I found. I had to put in the years to gain the requisite M.A. and Ph.D.; to teach at Princeton; to become a professor and research director of a major project at the UCLA School of Medicine; to lay down the track of publications, including an award-winning book, to make it obvious to even the most skeptical there must be something here.

Most crucial in the end, I also had to co-found and work for over a decade with a remarkable group of research scientists, educators, and other scholars from Italy, Hungary, Finland, England, France, Germany, Russia, and China as well as the U.S. in the development of advanced evolution theory. Otherwise, what I report here would never have been believed. And after all this, here was the irony: that in the end I found the quickest and most effective way of finding the lost map to the better world our species has sought for thousands of years was something any computer literate eight year can do.


The True Story of Human Evolution

By chance I came across a CD-ROM version of The Descent of Man, which made a computerized word search of this and other books by Darwin possible. Using the simple “find’ procedure familiar to most of us these days, I then did some word counts looking for what— based on all we have been taught or told— we would expect to find in this purported pivotal guide to the ways and means of human evolution. Here are the results.

Survival of the fittest, used 2 times in Descent
Competition, 9 times
Selfish and selfishness, 12 times

Was this possible? Surely, it couldn’t be. For what we are looking at here is the purported scientific and educational emphasis for a whole century—that is, this has been it for the old story for human evolution.

In other words, what we have been told by mainstream Darwinians and evolution theorists chiefly matters in human evolution in Descent actually collapses into hardly more than a blip within this book of 898 pages of very small print. And in one of the two places for “survival of the fittest” Darwin is actually apologizing for exaggerating the importance of this concept!

I then tried word counts for some of the things most of us as educators or parents have wished Darwin might have written of—in other words, things that in our unscientific naivete might seem to be of supreme developmental or evolutionary importance in our lives, things indeed that for thousands of years our greatest spiritual visionaries and philosophers have pointed toward as paths to the better world.

Love = 95 times
Moral sensitivity and morality = 92
Sympathy = 61
Mutual, mutuality, mutual aid = 24

Could it be that Darwin had actually written that it was caring for others, moral sensitivity and cooperation (for they used “mutuality” in place of the word “cooperation” back then) that mainly drives ahead human evolution?

But there was more. Likewise dumbfounding, here are the word counts for what I found he was also writing about in completing his theory of evolution—or what most matters at our species level of emergence.

Mind = 90
“Intellectual qualities and powers” = 58
“Intellectual powers” = 17
Reason = 53
Imagination = 25
Learning = 18
Consciousness = 15
Curiosity = 14
Instruction = 10
Brain = 110
Habit = 108

What are we looking at here? Could this be true? For isn’t this what, from the Greeks to the Enlightenment, the great classics of our species celebrate? Isn’t this what we seek as parents and as teachers to bring to life and encourage in our students and our children? Isn’t this what every one of us with the least spark or spunk of mind going for us most deeply values?

In brain and mind, aren’t we looking at the tool we use to mine meaning from the stuff of life? In habit aren’t we looking at the glue for the learning process that locks the treasure of meaning in place in mind?

“Oh these are only word counts,” the skeptic unacquainted with the power of this long-established social and systems scientific methodology will say. These counts, I found, were backed up by page after page of the text that Darwin wrote only to be almost entirely ignored or bypassed for over 100 years, which the chapters of this book recover word for word. What I saw we are looking is not the evolution of our species as for a century it has been holy writ for much of science to portray it. Instead, we are looking at the evolutionary upgrading of our span on earth as a revolution of mind that drives action against all that would blunt, or divert, or diminish, or imprison us.

And isn’t this revolution driven by what our own good sense tells us is the case, but which has failed to gain the expert corroboration that could make us sure of it? In a nation and far too much of the rest of the world hellbent on numbing and dumbing itself down, isn’t this the revolutionary as well as evolutionary thrust traditionally denied by the Neos and even mocked by the Super-Neos of education and learning?

Rather than being driven by the selfish gene, isn’t what matters at our level of evolution the unselfish teacher?


Blotting Out the Better World

I really cannot adequately express how this hit me when these word counts finally slammed across what I had been seeing over all the years of my own research and that of countless others either moving toward this simple revelation or again and again pointing it out only to be ignored.

Set out this way, bit by bit, carefully within context, the difference between genes and teachers as the drivers of human evolution seems obvious, of course. One might think it was impossible for anyone to think otherwise. But the power of the paradigm of PseudoDarwinian Mind is one of the most subtle of the hidden facts of our lives. I saw that across the board, with few exceptions, those of us who pride ourselves on being educated are rigorously taught to go by what we are told by authority rather than by what we can see with our own eyes. It is true we may be aware of something called “cultural evolution.” We may, as I and countless others were at some point, even be involved in the study of the psychology of learning. But after a century of indoctrination by the portion of science with a monopoly on evolution theory—with, one might say, the Biology Corporation’s “gene” franchise like a hamburger stand on every corner— for most of us in other fields of science to link learning or culture to evolution has seemed a daring quantum jump beyond the limits decreed for our field.

One of the reasons I left the world of the newsman was that I tired of just reporting on the awful things we were doing to each other. Wanting to do something about changing what I was forced to see and report again and again and again, I left journalism to become a social and systems scientist because I thought this was the way to build the better world. But was this blind alley what the great founders of science and education had meant for these pivotal fields to become?

In only 300 years had science and education become the burial ground rather than the birth place of truth?

For this discrepancy didn’t indicate just some minor distortion and cover-up by “the establishment.” Darwin’s is the main theory that opened up modern times. It was the major revolution for mind upon which much of the science of all living systems has been based as well as our hopes for progressive education. And directly to the point of what I had personally experienced as a child of the Great Depression, as a veteran of World War II, and afterward observed as a working newsman and social commentator, throughout the 20th century this theory was a major source of guidance for social policy.

In other words, what I came to see as I pushed on and on into what had become the no man’s land for much of science was this: that behind the politics, behind the economics, behind the schools and every other large social entity that shapes our lives, lies what we have been taught is the gospel according to Charles Darwin of kill, clobber, or outsmart thy brother before he kills, clobbers, or outsmarts you. Worded of course much more discretely and evasively, this I saw has been core dogma for the science used to either back up or justify the mess across the board that the 20th has now passed on to the 21st century.

This was further the man and the theory that probably more than any other contribution by any other member of our species has been poured over and written about by more hundreds of thousands of scientists and other scholars. Surely it was impossible, but what else are we to conclude? For if this discrepancy was true—if dutifully, lockstep over a century, they could say his emphasis was on selfishness and “survival of the fittest” when in fact he wrote far more often of love and moral sensitivity at our level of emergence— it pointed toward a blinding and cover-up of inconceivably huge dimensions.

Keeping this last major and potentially most important report of the voyaging of that great mind from ever reaching us would have required an arrangement— albeit unconscious, clearly non-intentional—involving much of the world of science, of scholarship, of education, and yes, too, of publishing and journalism stretching from Darwin’s death well over 100 years ago through the whole of the 20th century into the 21st century. How on earth could this have happened?

There were other reasons: of history, of personality, of the vagaries of scholarship and publishing. But I found the short answer and the main reason was this. The “better half” we are to look at in this book was buried by paradigm. More specifically, it was tucked away and plastered over by the systems dynamics of the vast invisible, blinding, binding, under-girding and over-riding power of PseudoDarwinian Mind we are to grapple with in this book.

Simply stated, Origin’s view of life as a bloody battle for survival of the fittest happens to fit the prevailing mindset for what we call “the powers-that-be,” “the power elite,” “the establishment,” “the fat cats,” or “ruling upper crust” in practically all areas of life around the globe, democracies included. It fits and serves the purpose of the top down or dominator governance model still prevailing in business, in government, in education, and— as the super-bloody Islamic terrorism now atop redneck Christian terrorism has at last forced us to see— in the worst kind of thing masquerading as religion. So why should science be the one exception?


Discovery and Reconstruction of the Lost Theory

The full answer to the question of how and why the lost top half or completion for Darwin’s theory could be blotted off the map for over 100 years I found to be so long, complex, and of such immense importance for us to fully understand, it could only be adequately handled in another book. Here we will focus on the lost theory itself, on the incredible story that moves out from and around it, and on the implications for all of us who today are trying to find a way to get back on track in the journey to the better world that seems bogged down in detours everywhere.

We will explore what the lost top half is, how Darwin came to write it, its radical difference point for point with what we have been told is the truth about ourselves according to Darwin, the startling range of modern science he both anticipates and that corroborates his vision, the rise and spread throughout Western civilization of the blinding power of the paradigm of PseudoDarwinian Mind, and how by exposing and understanding it for the sickness it is we can put it behind us.

In Part I: A Young Man’s Bold Vision, we meet and get to know Darwin in the critical months during which he first strayed on what became the known theory of evolution for which he became famous but also the seemingly contrary insights that became the lost completion for his theory of evolution. We also get to know the first of the amazing number of works of modern science he anticipates, which in turn not only corroborate the power and coherence of the lost theory. Cumulating quietly and steadily over a century of neglect, in fleshing out Darwin’s original vision these key modern works point the way toward the fully human, or “full spectrum, action-oriented” theory and story of evolution that now offers our children and grand children, i.e., our species, its hope for the better world and a better future.

In Part II: An Old Man’s Surprises, it’s now 30 years later. Darwin is world famous, a happy but frequently ill family man. With his sprawling home in the little town of Down functioning as a combination research and publishing center, at the hub of a worldwide network of corresponding naturalists, with his children working like a band of elves as research and book publishing assistants, he now picks up the task where he left off earlier. Chapter after chapter we follow him as he writes of what, in page after page, is to be published in all the major languages of this earth only to disappear as surely as if if it had been written in invisible ink.

Night after night, we are there in Darwin’s study in Down House as he now writes of who we really are. Of how rather than as we have been brain-washed over many centuries to believe, we are basically good, more often than not driven by moral sensitivity. Of how, though selfish, we are also driven by love to transcend selfishness, and of how, though fiercely motivated to survive and prevail, we are also driven by the transcendent need to respect and care for the needs of others.

We are there as he writes of how though in part, or even throughout much of our lives, we may be the captives, victims and even slaves of forces larger than ourselves, above all we are driven by a brain and a mind with the hunger and the capability for a choice of destiny in a world in which choice of destiny is an option.

And we are there as he writes of where we are going. Not of how we are driven blindly, witlessly, through a life with no predictability, which has convinced us we are but sheep in need of the wolf as leader, but rather of how we are driven by a brain that demands of life a sense of meaning and purpose, and by the vision of a better future.

We are there as, to buck us up, he writes, “That the way is not easy, that we face enormous obstacles, is everywhere evident.”

As he tells us, “Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of our nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced either directly or indirectly much more through the effects of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion, etc., than through natural selection.”

As he writes, “But the more important elements for us are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy.”

Of how, “Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that our social instincts will grow weaker.”

And of how, “The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events that our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion.”

________________________________________________

ABOUT DAVID LOYE

Behind the books of David Loye lies an unusual career path. A news correspondent with the Navy in the closing years of World War II, he became a television newsman during the Edward R.Murrow days of early television pioneering. After writing an award winning book on American history and gaining his doctorate in psychology in early middle age, while a Princeton and UCLA School of Medicine faculty member he was the research director for major studies of political values, the use of the brain and mind in prediction, and the impact of movies and television on adults.

In later years, after co-founding two international organizations involved in advanced evolution studies, he has focused primarily on the development of action-oriented evolution theories. So far, these include Moral Transformation Theory, Evolutionary Action Theory, and a Triadic Theory of Evolution.

With his wife and partner, evolution theorist and well-known author of The Chalice and the Blade and Tomorrow’s Children Riane Eisler, Loye is a co-founder of The Center for Partnership Studies, in which Eisler and Loye both still remain active as board members and, respectively, president and vice president. The Center is a nonprofit organization involved in the development of the Partnership Educational Program for advancement of American and global education. The Darwin Project is a venture of the Center’s Partnership Outreach Program.


THE BOOKS OF DAVID LOYE

The current focus for The Darwin Project is on the first of The Darwin “Better World” Cycle of seven books by Loye. Nearing publication by SUNY Press is The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution. Based on Loye’s discovery and startling reconstruction of Darwin’s “lost theory” and its implications for humanity in the 21st century, other books in the cycle include Darwin’s Truth: Who We Really Are and Where We’re Going and The Darwin Scam: How the Truth About Our Species was Buried for 100 Years. Publication of these and other books for the cycle follows publication of parts earlier in World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, Zygon, Advanced Development, Brain and Mind, Pluriverso, The Journal of Futures Studies, the Annual Proceedings of the International Society for Systems Sciences, and other publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

The Healing of a Nation (Norton, 1971; Delta, 1972) is a national award-winning book on the psychology, sociology, and history of race relations in America. In The Leadership Passion (Jossey-Bass, 1977) Loye pioneered in the development of a systems psychology of liberals and conservatives and the dynamics of politics. In The Knowable Future (Wiley, 1978) he moved on to explore the new field of futures studies and to begin the work of many years in the study of how we predict the future. The Sphinx and the Rainbow (Shambhala New Science Library, 1982; Bantam, 1984; with German, Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese editions) expanded this venture into brain research and his development of a holographic brain-mind theory for futures prediction. All of these books have been republished and are now again available through amazon.com, iuniverse.com, bn.com, and elsewhere.

With Riane Eisler, Loye co-authored The Partnership Way (Harper San Francisco, 1990; Holistic Education Press, 1997). He is the editor of The Evolutionary Outrider (Adamantine, Praeger, 1998), a book of essays by Ervin Laszlo, Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, Riane Eisler, Loye and others on the human impact on evolution. An Arrow Through Chaos (Park Street Press, 2000) applies pioneering work by Loye to show we have a far greater capacity for both predicting and shaping the future than present chaos theory allows. Making It in the Dream Factory (forthcoming from Hampton Press) is a 20 year systems study and hard-hitting critique of the making, marketing, and impact of movies and television programs on the American and global mind. Forthcoming from SUNY Press, The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution contains chapters by Loye and other members of the General Evolution Research Group on what an action-oriented, fully human theory of evolution should look like and how to build it.


LOYE'S SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND

Building on a B.S. in psychology at Dartmouth and an M.A. in the psychology of personality and a Ph.D. in social psychology with a sociology minor from the New School for Social Research (now New School University), over the years Loye has accumulated the experience and training to work as an expert in social, experimental, survey, and media research, and as a professional systems scientist, futurist, and evolution theorist.

A former member of the psychology faculty of Princeton University, for nearly a decade Dr.Loye was a professor in the research series and Director of Research for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is a co-founder of the Society for the Study of Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences and a co-founder of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG), a multidisciplinary group composed of scholars from Italy, France, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Russia, China, and the United States.

He is an editor, board member and book reviewer for the group's journal, World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, a member of the advisory council of the journal Advanced Development, and the scientific advisory council to Pluriverso, a leading European intellectual journal.

His psychohistory The Healing of a Nation received the Anisfield Wolfe Award for the best scholarly book on race relations in 1971. The Leadership Passion was hailed by Contemporary Psychology as a "major advance" in its field. The Knowable Future and The Sphinx and the Rainbow are recognized as pioneering works of unusual stature in futures studies and the psychology of consciousness.

Two books of which he is the editor are notable for their contribution to the development of an adequate theory of evolution. He is the editor of The Evolutionary Outrider: The Impact of the Human Agent on Evolution — a book of essays by evolutionary scientists in which Loye introduces his own development of Evolution Action Theory and Riane Eisler’s development of Relational Dynamics—and The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution, in which Loye and other members of the General Evolution Research Group probe prospects for building a “full spectrum, action-oriented” theory of evolution.

For his contribution to the development of chaos theory in social science, in 1999 he was honored with the Humanitarian Award of the Society for the Study of Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences. “For contributions to the chaos community and the evolution of moral sensitivity,” the Award reads. In a recent book, An Arrow Through Chaos, Loye outlines the new view of the power and the function in evolution of our human capacity to predict the future on which in part this award was based. A special award in 2000 by the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning honored Riane Eisler and David Loye for “a human and intellectual partnership that has been dedicated to the knowledge of what matters most to future life.”

Besides many articles in magazines and journals, Loye is a contributor (with the late Milton Rokeach) to the International Encylopedia of Neurology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology; to the World Encyclopedia of Peace published by Pergamon Press; and—writing on the concept of evil—to the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict Resolution published by Academic Press.

Copyright: David Loye
Used with kind Permission