Author: Ardea Skybreak
Bio: Ardea Skybreak is a scientist with professional training in ecology and evolutionary biology. She is a follower of Bob Avakian and an advocate of the New Communism which he has developed. Skybreak comes from a cosmopolitan background and has traveled extensively and interacted with people from many different cultures. From a very early age, she was encouraged to become a critical thinker and systematically trained as an intellectual with a wide and diverse range of interests and passions in a great many spheres of both arts and sciences.  Skybreak has had a lifelong commitment to demystifying and broadly popularizing evidence-based science and the scientific method.  She feels strongly that when people are denied the means to apply the basic methods of science to probe and explore reality, they not only miss out on being able to fully appreciate the beauty and wonder of the natural world, but also end up being deprived of the very best means to correctly understand the history and defining characteristics of any phenomenon or process (how things are, and how they got to be that way) and to uncover both the basis, and the potential pathways, of change, not only in nature, but in human societies as well. In Skybreak’s view, the fact that large parts of humanity have been deprived of a scientific understanding and approach is a problem that is being further compounded in today’s world by the widespread politically motivated attacks on science.  She argues that actively combating anti-science, and promoting the consistent application and broad popularization of the scientific method, is essential if we are to find the ways to interact appropriately with the whole of the natural world, and to radically reorganize human societies in keeping with the objective interests of all of humanity.
		
Skybreak has explored a wide range of social, political, scientific, and philosophical topics.  Skybreak’s books include The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters [Insight Press, 2006]; 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 [Banner Press, 1984];she is also the author of  a number of articles including “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.” 

In 2015 Insight Press published a lively, provocative and extensive interview with Skybreak: SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION: On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian, An Interview with Ardea Skybreak.