About Ardea Skybreak
October 14, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The following biography is taken from Ardea Skybreak's book The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What's Real and Why It Matters.
Ardea Skybreak was formally trained as a biologist specializing in evolutionary biology and community ecology. She is committed to broadly popularizing science and the scientific method. Skybreak feels strongly that when people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to really understand the dynamics of change in nature and society.
Skybreak comes from a cosmopolitan background and has traveled extensively and interacted with people of many different cultures. From a very early age, she was encouraged to become a critical thinker and systematically trained as an intellectual in the European tradition. This fueled a wide and diverse range of interests and passions in a great many spheres of both arts and sciences.
Skybreak was profoundly influenced during her high school and college years by the great upheavals of the 1960s and the way in which "revolution was in the air." The Vietnam War; Malcolm X; the Black Panthers; the radical movement for the emancipation of women; China, the Cultural Revolution, and Mao—were for her, as for so many others, formative.
Pursuing her passion for biology, in the early and mid-1970s Skybreak accumulated significant research experience in both the lab and the field. A true explorer, she was at her happiest when she could combine discussing the latest theoretical concepts with her fellow biologists and slogging through wet tropical forests on some field research expedition. She taught college level science, published in professional journals, earned a masters degree, and was well on her way to earning a PhD in biology.
Order at Insight Press
As a young working scientist, Skybreak was living exactly the life she wanted to live, but at the same time she continued to be outraged by social injustice and felt a compelling need for revolutionary change in the world. Before completing her PhD thesis, she made the difficult decision to leave the PhD program to devote herself fulltime to broader social and political commitments. However, she never lost her passion for scientific investigation, her love of adventure, and her enthusiasm for applying and popularizing the methods of science, without which she feels there can be no valid understanding of reality or of how to change it.
Ardea's life experiences and work have taken her from major urban areas the world over to exotic wilderness locales, from teaching in academia to working in factories for minimum wage.
She is equally at ease engaging with artists and intellectuals or sitting with the residents of a housing project around their kitchen table talking about life and philosophy.
As a writer with a revolutionary communist perspective, she has explored a wide range of social, political, scientific, and philosophical topics. Her writings include Of Primeval Steps and Future Leaps: An Essay on the Emergence of Human Beings, the Source of Women's Oppression, and the Road to Emancipation; "Some Ideas on the Social Role of Art"; "Not in Our Genes and the Waging of the Ideological Counteroffensive"; "Remembering Stephen Jay Gould"; and "Working with Ideas and Searching for Truth: A Reflection on Revolutionary Leadership and the Intellectual Process."
A voracious reader and observer of popular culture, she draws on history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, political science, art, music, movies—as well as the natural sciences—to make her subject matter come alive. At the core of everything she writes, and what her latest book conveys so powerfully, is the importance of "knowing what's real—and why it matter."
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.