William E. Magnusson

William (Bill) Magnusson was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1952. He received his Ph.D. from Sydney University in 1979, the same year he moved to Brazil. His primary interest is biodiversity conservation, and those interested in the subject can consult his book Biodiversity and Integrated Environmental Monitoring (ISBN 978-85-65551-04-5). He is an author on over 300 scientific publications covering a wide variety of topics, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and lives in Manaus with his wife, daughter and dogs.

Because most scientific papers focus on a limited range of topics and time scales, it is hard for non-specialists to appreciate their ramifications. Therefore, Bill has written popular books on his studies of crocodiles (The Eye of the Crocodile - ISBN 978-1-941926-14-7), amphibians and fish (The Fish and the Frogs - ISBN 978-1-941926-83-3), Squamata (Snakes and Other Lizards - ISBN 978-1-946898-49-4), and birds and mammals (Furred and Feathered Things – ISBN 978-1-6641-8557-9). Readers in many parts of the World do not have the money to buy hard copies of books, so all those are also available in digital format for free or at a very low price.

Conservation is about moral decisions and this led Bill to realize that all traditional moral systems are ad-hoc and anthropocentric. Only evolution can give us values that are meaningful for humans, other organisms, and self-aware machines. If you are interested, read Diversity, Freedom and Evolution (ISBN 978-1-5275-3086-7).

Bill is a technological dinosaur and only manages to publish these books because he doesn´t spend time on social media (he is old enough that he still craves human contact). If you´d like to communicate with him, send a message to wemagnusson@gmail.com.