DAVID LOYE
“Our lives are a storm-tossed sea adventure with love the home port.”
—1001 Days of Love
I am a psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist, and the author of many books unusual, among other aspects, in still being completed and published by a man in his 90ties.
Among scientific subjects are my books on Darwin, moral evolution, evolution theory, history, prediction of the future, and social action. Of more of the good life are my books of adventure, travel, humor, children’s stories, poems, and love.
This brief biography will cover my:
Life in brief.
Books on:
and love.
future studies, and ideology.
(in chaos theory, moral theory, communications
studies, evolution theory).
My scientific contributions and books come out of a life of active involvement in the events of our time.
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I'm a World War II veteran married to a Holocaust survivor: internationally known author and cultural evolution theorist Riane Eisler. After WWII I became a (very young!) television newsman in the Edward R.Murrow days. Leaving news to gain a doctorate in psychology, I wrote the national award-winning book that set the main themes for my life work thereafter: the application of science to human and planetary advancement, moral evolution, and social, political, and spiritual action..
Focusing on how to heal the “black and white sickness” of racism in America, for The Healing of a Nation in 1971, I received the national award earlier given to Martin Luther King and the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal for An Americian Dilemma.
Three more books on predicting and shaping the future followed. I moved from teaching at Princeton to the UCLA School of Medicine faculty to become Research Director for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future, Neuropsychiatric Institute. Here I became the research director of a pioneering study of the impact of mass entertainment on evolution and human survival.
In the 1980s I became involved in advanced evolution research after a secret meeting of concerned scientists behind the Iron Curtain. Fearing that nuclear war would break out between Russia and the U.S., scientists from both sides secretly met in Budapest to see if the destructive fixation on Darwinian “survival of the fittest” could be replaced with a new cooperatively oriented theory of evolution. With others who became long time working associates, I became a co-founder of the multinational General Evolution Research Group and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, of which I am former book review editor and a member of the editorial board.
In the 1990s came a pivotal event for my life. In what became a classic case of going "up against the paradigm," I uncovered Darwin’s long ignored passionate case for moral evolution rather than survival of the fittest as the prime driver for human evolution. Of my key book for six written and published so far of the Darwin discovery, Darwin’s Lost Theory, internationally eminent scientists have written: “...everyone concerned with our understanding of evolution on this planet owes Loye a deep debt of gratitude...Of urgent importance to the intellectual discourse of our time...has brought his unique erudition to an enormous and critical task, and
carried it off with genius...Should cause a revolution in social theory...Dramatically changes our understanding of Darwin and of evolution itself...One of the major books of the early Twenty-First Century."
See What the Experts Say for names and full statements. See Personal Life for more of the life that's been mine.
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Of accolades for my work on Darwin, particularly useful in placing it within the history of science and the pattern for evolution is noted chaos theorist Ralph Abraham's observation that it “corrects an oversight in the history of science which has swerved the modern world off its track.”
The potentially revolutionary nature of my reconstruction for Darwinian theory is perhaps best indicated by the unexpected course for the creative process out of which my Darwin books emerged. Out of a first book now out of print, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love, I first launched a six book Darwin Anniversary Cycle to untangle the distortion and disastrous consequences of "survival of the fittest" and "selfish gene" Darwinism.
Availablewith online booksellers worldwide or on order through book stores, the first four books for the Darwin Cycle are: Bankrolling Evolution: A Program for a President, Measuring Evolution: A Leadership Guide to the Health and Wealth of Nations, Darwin’s Lost Theory: Who We Really Are and Where We’re Going, and Darwin on Love: The Real Story of Evolution.
With these first four of the six completed and published, on finding so little discernible headway anywhere in going up against the prevailing "survival of the fittest" and "selfish gene" paradigm, I broke off to expand the originally intended fifth book into a deliberately explosive and hard-hitting trilogy Darwin and the Battle for 21st Century Mind. As they’re being written, chapters are being published online in advance of publication in print for global distribution.
My study of moral evolution began in 1971 with The Healing of a Nation. Here I first made the case for a new moral oriented field of science and an action oriented healing therapy for nations. Thereafter, book after book, my work on moral evolution piled up in the background unpublished while the fight to build an evolutionary action-oriented group of leading scientists and educators and gain publication for my contrarian Darwin work absorbed most of my time.
In The Parable of the Three Villages I tell the tale of the saintly village of Osanto, the vicious village of Snarlsgrrrr, and in a lightly disguised analogue for our own global situation, the hopelessly confused and endangered village of Mystifu. Turning to the genre of history and biography, in The River and the Star: The Lost Story of the Great Explorers of the Better World, I bring to life the fascinating lives, times, and development of moral theory by the founders of modern social science: Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Erich Fromm, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan and other new voices of the women's revolution.
Lacking only a final fine tuning, now scheduled for publication in 2010, are the three books of my Glacier and the Flame trilogy—The Glacier and the Flame I: Rediscovering Goodness; The Glacier and the Flame II: Redefining Evil; and The Glacier and the Flame III: A Fragment of a Vision—plus The Science of Evil: What Makes us Good or Bad? and Moral Sensitizing: A guide to a new method of of learning and therapy for teachers, counselors, ministers, and self-healers.
In addition to many articles in scientific journals, an important aspect of my contribution to the study and development of evolution theory has been my work as the organizer and editor of books to bring together advanced work by leading scholars and educators in this field.
The Evolutionary Outrider: The Impact of the Human Agent on Evolution (Praeger, 1998) includes chapters on this theme by Ervin Laszlo, Fritjof Capra, Mae-Wan Ho, Karl Pribram, Alfonso Montuori, Maria Sagi, Raymond Trevor Bradley, Mauro Ceruti and Telmo Pievani, Riane Eisler, Ralph Abraham, Hazel Henderson, Paul Ray, and myself.
The Great Adventure: Toward a Fully Human Theory of Evolution (SUNY Press, 2004) includes chapters by Ervin Laszlo, Stanley Salthe, Raymond Bradley, Riane Eisler, Sally Goerner, Ken Bausch, Alexander Cristakis, Alfonso Montuori, Allan Combs, Ruth Richards, and myself. This is the pivotal multi-authored book in which the evolutionary systems scientific grounding for my development of the Global Sounding measure of personal and global health and wellbeing and the Global Sounding Moral Code is first fully developed.
Of The Great Adventure, in his Foreword Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes , “In times like these a new worldview often arises at the margins of power...the themes introduced by the authors are likely to be among the central ones of any new world-view...Loye’s central insight, which motivates this book, is in my opinion right on the money. The organizing principle of the new faith—a faith of human beings about human beings—is evolution itself. Not the traditionally taught evolutionary scenario dominated by competition and selfishness, but an understanding closer to the original Darwinian that sees cooperation and transcendence of the self as the most exciting parts of the story.”
Additionally, I am the co-author with Riane Eisler of a widely used handbook on how to advance evolution through social, political, economic, and spiritual action, The Partnership Way: Healing Ourselves,Our Communities, and Our World (Harper-Collins, 1990.
Books of Entertainment, Humor, and Love
Out of my personal life have come all of the books I've written mainly to express the wonder and the joy or the frustration and dismay of the adventure of life, as we all seek to live it.
Brave Laughter is the story of nine generations of family on my mother’s side centering on the independent minded funny story tellers I grew up listening to as a child living in the family commune on White Bear Lake in Minnesota. Return to Amalfi is the story of my journey with Riane to a traveler’s paradise to investigate the possibility that in a dramatic past life I lived there 400 years ago as a spice merchant. Tangled Tales of the Book Trade, or the Mystery of the Missing Century is a book in the surreal social satire tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., written to express frustration and dismay with the lunacy of the American political and publishing worlds during the Reagan-Bush years. Grandfather’s Garden (forthcoming) is an offbeat book of children’s stories. 3,000 Years of Love is a joint biography of the two of us, Riane Eisler and David Loye, covering our early lives, books, theories, adventures around the world in social action advancing the women's, human rights, progressive science, progressive politics, global partnership movements, and home life. 100 Days of Love is a collection of poems I wrote during our first three months together. 1001 Days of Love is a book of love and other poems to Riane written over our thirty years together.
Early Books on the Science of Prediction,
Future Studies, and Ideology
Prior to my involvement in the development of evolutionary systems science and evolution theory, I was chiefly known for my work in the science of prediction, the study of potential futures, and the conflict of Right versus Left, or liberal versus conservative ideologies.
Along with many articles in journals, The Knowable Future: A Psychology of Forecasting and Prophecy (Wiley, 1978) is the first of five books on the psychology, methods, and evolutionary guidance function of our ability to predict the future. This first book provides the grounding for later books in right brain, left brain, ideological and so-called paranormal differences, and the development of Ideological Matrix Prediction or the IMP method of forecasting. In tests of IMP this new method outperformed long established national polls in predicting presidential election results.
The Sphinx and the Rainbow: Brain, Mind, and Future Vision (New Science Library, 1983; Bantam New Age, 1984; various foreign editions) expanded the reach for my prediction studies with a pioneering addition of early frontal brain to left and right brain research, a probe of the potential for precognition in terms of my development of the concept of the “hololeap” based on Karl Pribram’s holonomic brain theory, and the development and application to problems in business and other areas of life of Hemispheric Consensus Prediction, or the HCP method of forecasting.
An Arrow Through Chaos: How We See Into The Future (Park Street Press, 2000) further extended the reach for this probe of our neglected basic capacity for both survival and human fulfillment with the addition of chaos and complexity theory to the expanding mix. Through the marshaling of data and conceptual analysis this book is of potential historic importance in puncturing the prevailing impression that chaos theory proved prediction of the future is impossible.
Delayed over the years, but now scheduled for publication in 2011, is Making It In the Dream Factory: Creativity, Prediction, and Survival in Hollywood and the Global Marketplace. Based on my 30 year study of how “hits” are predicted and created in the American entertainment industry and for successful products for global business generally, this culminating book for my prediction studies brings together all of the above, with a final startling series of successful tests, including prediction in advance of success for the famous Star Wars movie series.
I graduated with a psychology major from Dartmouth College in 1948. Returning to graduate studies at the New School for Social Research at age 38, I gained my Master’s degree in the pre-clinical psychology of personality in 1966, and then my Ph.D. in social psychology, with a sociology minor, in 1976.
During my years of night school at the New School for Social Research, my education in both social science and measurement studies continued during my day time employment as a monitor and reporter of ongoing basic studies at what was then the largest educational research center in the world maintained by Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.
I was a visiting lecturer teaching independent studies at Princeton University for the 1971-72 Winter term, then moved to the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine, 1972-1978. After six years as Research Director for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future for UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, I gained a full professorship in the research series.
Following my years at UCLA, I joined the under-financed but immeasurably liberated global ranks of the independent scholar. Out of my involvement in evolution studies, in 1986 I became a co-founder of the General Evolution Research Group. Ours became a multinational and multidisciplinary group of independent scholars interested in updating and expanding evolution theory with the rich new avenues offered by cybernetics, chaos, complexity, and self-organizing theories. Out of this involvement with chaos theory, in 1991 I became a co-founder of the similarly multinational Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences.
Then in 2005 I became the founder of The Darwin Project (www.thedarwinproject.com), with a Council of over fifty leading American, European, and Asian scientists and educators. Our goal was, and is, to help end the prevailing fixation on the degrading and disastrous so-called Darwinian theory of “survival of the fittest” with a shift to a fully human, action-oriented Darwinian theory of emphasis on moral sensitivity, education, and love as the primary driver for human evolution.
Chaos theory. Pioneered in the application of mathematical and natural scientific chaos theory to social science. (See “Chaos and Transformation: The Implications of Natural Scientific Nonequilibrium Theory for Science and Society,” Behavioral Science 32, 1, (1987): 53-65). Pioneered in expanding the capacity for chaos theory to both predict and shape human evolution. (See “Prediction in Chaotic Social, Economic, and Political Conditions,” published in journals and as Appendix A, An Arrow Through Chaos (Park Street Press, 2000). Co-founding of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, 1991.
Moral theory. Identification of an underlying consensus in progressive science as well as progressive religion on six foundations for moral evolution and transformation. Construction of a Global Ethic based on this discovery. (See Loye, D. “Can Science Help Construct a New Global Ethic? The Development and Implications of Moral Transformation Theory.” Zygon (1999): 34, 3, 221-235; plus The Glacier and the Flame I, II, III. Development of a theory of fifteen levels for evolution including moral evolution and spiritual evolution. Construction of the Global Sounding measure of global health and happiness and a Global Sounding Moral Code based on this development. (See Bankrolling Evolution and Measuring Evolution). Development of the brain-based rationale for the Guidance System of Higher Mind. (See The Glacier and the Flame III). Articulation of the contrasting codes for Parnership Moral Sensitivity versus Dominator Moral Insensitivity (The Glacier and the Flame II). Development of moral sensitizing as a method for moral healing (See Moral Sensitizing: A guide to a new method of of learning and therapy for teachers, counselors, ministers, and self-healers).
Evolution theory. Reclamation of the lost humanistic completion and reconstruction of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Besides many journal articles, see the six books of the Darwin Anniversary Cycle and the trilogy Darwin and the Battle for 21st Century Mind). Development of Evolution Action Theory. (See Evolutionary Action Theory, in Loye, D., ed., The Evolutionary Outrider: The Impact of the Human Agent on Evolution (Praeger, 1998). Development of A Triadic Theory of Evolution and a New Language for Evolution (work in progress).
Methodology. Development of the Ideological Matrix Profile (IMP) and Hemispheric Consensus Profile (HCP). (See The Knowable Future, The Sphinx and the Rainbow, and An Arrow Through Chaos). Development of the Moral Sensitivity Profile (MSP) and Psychic Sensitivity Profile (PSP). (Unpublished papers). Development of the Global Ethic for Moral Transformation Theory. (See Zygon article, The Glacier and the Flame I, II, III). Development of The Global Sounding measure of global health and happiness and the Global Sounding Moral Code (See Bankrolling Evolution and Measuring Evolution.
Communications studies. Design and execution for the first major study of the impact of movies and television on adults. Development of the hurting versus helping test for assessing movie and television impact on adult males. Pioneering in the use of cable television for test administration. (See Loye, D., Gorney, R., and Steele, G. “Effects of Television: An Experimental Field Study,” in Journal of Communications 27 (1977): 206-216). Loye, D.“Television Effects: It's Not All Bad News.” Psychology Today (May, 1978). In 2010 I will complete and publish a 30 year study of the creativity, financing, and evolutionary function of the entertainment industry Making It in the Dream Factory.
The Moral Pioneering Award of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, presentation by Fred Abraham, President, 1993. An Award for Dedication “to the knowledge of what matters most to future life” by the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, presentation by Bruce Novak, President, 2000. Award of an honorary doctorate by the pioneering institution for humanistic psychology and systems science, the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, presentation by Lorne Buchman, President, 2008. Festschrift The Dialectics of Evolution: Essays in Honor of David Loye, Alfonso Montuori, Editor, World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution 49 (1997) 1-2, 3-17.
I was born on April 26, 1925, in Palo Alto, California. At the age of one my parents moved to Minnesota, where I grew up on White Bear Lake among families distinguished on both sides. My grandmother, Jenella Elliot Loye, was the daughter of pioneering Minnesotan Wyman Elliot, plant scientist (known as the Luther Burbank of the Northwest) and real estate developer who donated large tracts of land to what is Minneapolis today. My grandfather, C.W. Sanders, an early encourager of Sinclair Lewis and F.Scott Fitzgerald, was one of the leading American book sellers of his time. I write of the White Bear Lake years, nine generations of my mother's family known for their independence of mind and funny story telling, and the evolutionary function of a sense of humor in Brave Laughter.
At the conclusion of my years at the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles, in 1978 I met Holocaust survivor Riane Eisler and we moved to Carmel, California, to begin the long life together as partners in science and social action I write of in 3,000 Years of Love: The Life of Riane Eisler and David Loye, two books of poems, 100 Days of Love and 1001 Days of Love, and the travel, true adventure, romance, detective story and historical murder mystery Return to Amalfi.
