DYLAN EVANS: BIOGRAPHY

Dylan Evans is the author of several popular science books, including Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Placebo: The Belief Effect (HarperCollins, 2003). After receiving his PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics, he did postdoctoral research in philosophy at King’s College London and in robotics at the University of Bath before moving the University of the West of England (UWE) where he was Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems.  He left UWE in July 2006 to conduct an innovative project in sustainable living in the Scottish Hightlands called the Utopia Experiment.  In January 2008 he returned to academia, taking up the post of Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Ireland, where he did research on decision theory and risk management.  In September 2008 he moved to the School of Medicine, also at University College Cork, where he is now Lecturer in Behavioural Science.

He writes regularly for The Guardian and has made frequent appearances on radio and television, and given numerous talks at festivals of science and literature.  In 2001 he was voted one of the twenty best young writers in Britain by the Independent on Sunday , and was once described by the Guardian as ‘Alain de Botton in a lab coat’.  He has also done occasional performances as a DJ at literary events such as the Hay Festival of Literature and the Orange Prize for Fiction. He is a member of the Health Decision Making Research Group in the School of Medicine at University College Cork, a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association, an Expert Faculty Member at The School of Life, a Member of the Ethics Advisory Board at the Lifeboat Foundation, and a Member of the British Fulbright Scholars Assocation.

LONG VERSION:

I was born in Bristol in the UK on 29 September 1966.  Between 1977 and 1982 I attended Sevenoaks School in Sevenoaks, Kent, and then went to West Kent College of Further Education to take my A-levels.   In 1987 I went to Southampton University to read for a comibined honours BA degree in Spanish with Linguistics.  It was a four-year degree, the third year of which I spent in Argentina writing a dissertation about the hyperinflation from which the country was then suffering.  Living in Buenos Aires was a fascinating experience, not least because it led me into contact with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

For some strange reason that I have never been able to figure out, there are more psychoanalysts per capita in Buenos Aires than there are in New York City.  A suprisingly large proportion of these analysts are 'Lacanians', which mean that they follow the esoteric teachings of Jacques Lacan, an eccentric French psychoanalyst who broke away from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953 to found his own school.  Lacan proposed a reinterpretation of Freud's ideas, one that was couched at first in the terms of Saussurian linguistics.  It was this linguistic element in Lacan's work that first drew me to him.

I became so interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis that, on my return to Buenos Aires in 1992 (on a two-year contract to teach English as a foreign language at International House) I decided to go into psychoanalytic treatment myself with a Lacanian analyst, and to train as an analyst.  I also started writing my first book, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis , mainly in order to make sense of the bizarre ideas for myself.  As the ideas started to become clearer, however, they became increasingly less convincing.

Despite my incipient scepticism, I returned to the UK in 1994 to continue my training as a Lacanian psychoanalyst (with the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, or CFAR, in London) and to study for the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies in the Humanities at the University of Kent at Canterbury.  As both the training and the course progressed, however, my doubts about Lacan, and psychoanalysis in general continued to grow.  They did not abate when, in 1995 I went into private practice, and also started working part-time for the British National Health Service providing outpatient psychotherapy at a clinical psychology department in South London.  Eventually, my doubts about the efficacy and validity of psychoanalysis became so great that I realised I could not go on working as a therapist any longer with a clear conscience.

I quit all my clinical work and decided to do a PhD to grapple with the questions that had been forming in my mind during my clinical work.  Was there anything about psychoanalysis that was worth saving?  What alternative theories of mental disorder should we look to instead?  I spent a few months at the State University of New York in Buffalo with a prominent Lacanian scholar, but was put off by the terrible weather there and the tempting offer of a place at the London School of Economics (LSE), where the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method had offered me a place on their PhD program.

The LSE was a veritable hive of intellectual debate.  I plunged into the electric atmosphere with gusto, and soon came across the inspiring figure of Helena Cronin.   Helena introduced me to evolutionary psychology, and I was entranced.  Here was an approach to the mind that was scientifically sound, in contrast to the crazy ideas of Freud and Lacan.  Thanks to the Darwin@LSE series of public seminars, which Helena organised, I was able to meet many of the world's leading experts on evolutionary psychology.  It was during my time as a graduate student at LSE that I wrote my first 'cartoon book', Introducing Evolutionary Psychology .  For a more detailed account of my intellectual journey from Lacanian psychoanalysis to evolutionary psychology - a journey that still evokes surprise among both Lacanians and Darwinians - click here for a PDF of a chapter I wrote for a book entitled The Literary Animal.

In my PhD thesis, I examined various approaches within cognitive science to the study of emotion.  I contrasted the classical perspective with other 'non-classical' ones such as evolutionary psychology, and argued for an integrated cognitive science that would combine the best of the classical and the non-classical variants (for a gzipped tarball containing all of my thesis in PDF format, click here).  Some of the research for this thesis went into my 2001 book, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment .  I received my PhD in August 2000, and the next month I took up a position as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Philosophy Department at King's College London, where I helped to run a project investigating the evolution of emotions .  It was during my time at King's Collge that I began work on my book, Placebo: The Belief Effect .

In my thesis and in my book Emotion , I wondered about the possibility of robots acquiring emotions.  I became increasingly interested in a discipline known as evolutionary robotics, and attended some fascinating conferences.  I began to wish I could do some research in this area myself, but as I had no background in engineering or AI, I doubted that it would ever be possible.  In 2001, however, I got lucky and got a research position in evolutionary robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath (one of the best departments of Mechanical Engineering in the UK).

This page was last updated: 2 January 2009.