About the author
W. Henry Gilbert
I'm a farmer. That's the honest first sentence now, and it surprises people who knew me in the other life. I grow walnuts in the Sacramento Valley, run water for a district full of neighbors, and on most nights, after the irrigation is set and the kids are down, I think about consciousness and tinker with a robot on the kitchen table. This notebook is what comes of those nights.
The other life was science. I took a PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley and spent years as a paleoanthropologist in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia — one of the richest fossil-bearing landscapes on Earth — hunting for human ancestors. I had a hand in some of the finds that made the textbooks: the Homo erectus Daka calvaria, the Homo sapiens idaltu crania from Herto, work in the Aramis beds where Ardipithecus came out of the ground. I edited the Daka volume on Pleistocene Homo erectus for the University of California Press, taught evolutionary biology and helped start an evolutionary-psychology track as an associate professor at Cal State East Bay, ran the lab and databases at Berkeley's Human Evolution Research Center, and co-built FOROST, a forensic-osteology database. The Leakey Foundation chipped in with a grant along the way. My full academic CV is here.
Then family circumstances pulled me home to the farm, and I let the tenured professorship go. I still get back to the field when I can, but my days now are walnuts and water and the hundred unglamorous tasks that prove you're a competent adult — HR, accounting, compliance, irrigation, board meetings. It's a good life, and it's a long way from a darkroom full of fossil casts.
What I actually do now
I farm walnuts across a few family operations — Bear River Walnut Ranch, Gilbert Orchards, the Gilbert Grove, Rio Oso Groves — wearing the president's or CFO's hat depending on the entity. I serve as president of the Camp Far West Irrigation District, which means I help move surface water to a lot of farms and answer for it when the season is dry. I started and run the Wheatland Farmers' Market. I do data work for the walnut industry, including a prospectus on forecasting the California walnut crop earlier and more honestly. And I'm shepherding a historic property, the Durst Mansion, toward life as an event venue.
Why a farmer keeps this notebook
Because the questions never left. The same evolutionary thinking that let me read a million-year-old skull is what makes me suspect you can grow the beginnings of a mind rather than design one — and being out of the academy, off its rails, is exactly what gave me the freedom to chase it without worrying whether it's respectable. My old undergraduate advisor Leda Cosmides set some of this in motion; my wife, Socorro Baez, a forensic anthropologist, keeps me honest; and my son is the one who actually wants to see the robot move. If you want the whole arc, it's in the index — from an essay written over the Rift Valley to a small machine that can tell when it's been pushed.
And it's all out in the open on purpose. If any of it ever works, the result — a mind — won't be mine to own or be credited for, any more than your mind is someone else's trophy. So I'd rather give the thinking away than pretend a claim over something that, by its nature, could belong to no one. (More on that here.)