Frans de Waal
Frans de Waal, a Dutch zoologist and ethologist, is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. De Waal is also director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the author of numerous books, including Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape, and Primates and Philosophers. His 1989 book Peacemaking Among Primates, a popularization of his fifteen years of research on conflict resolution in nonhuman primates, received the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In 1993, he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. De Waal was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2007.
Karl Giberson
Karl Giberson is director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts and executive vice-president of the BioLogos Foundation. Formerly the editor of both Science & Spirit and Science & Theology News, he was the director of the Erice Summer Program in Science and Religion and he organized, in collaboration with William Shea, the first workshop there in the summer of 2003. Giberson is the author of four books: Worlds Apart: The Unholy War Between Religion and Science, Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story (with Donald Yerxa), Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists Versus God and Religion (with Mariano Artigas), and Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution. Giberson is a contributing editor for Books & Culture, where his essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared frequently over the past several years. He has also published a number of scientific papers on atomic physics.
Simon Conway Morris
Simon Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge. He was a Gifford Lecturer in 2007, delivering a series of talks titled “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation.” He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Walcott Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London. Conway Morris has written two books on palaeobiology and evolution: The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals and Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. He also contributed a chapter titled “The Cambrian ‘Explosion’ of Metazoans” to the collection Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology edited by Gerd B. Müller and Stuart A. Newman.
Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and director of the History and Philosophy of Science program at Florida State University. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ruse founded the journal Biology and Philosophy and has published a number of books, including Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion; Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?; The Evolution-Creation Struggle; and Darwinism and its Discontents. Ruse was a Gifford Lecturer in 2001 and won the John Templeton Book Prize in 1999. Ruse also served as an expert witness in the 1981 case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, which ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas state law that called for equal time teaching evolution and “creation science.”
Józef Życiński
Józef Życiński is a philosopher and the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Archbishop of Lublin. He also serves as the Chair of Logic and Methodology at Kraków’s Papal Academy of Theology, a position he has held since 1980. Archbishop Życiński has published in numerous journals and has authored several books. His most notable works include W kręgu nauki i wiary (Between Religion and Science), Dylematy ewolucji (The Dilemmas of Evolution), God and Evolution. Fundamental Questions of Christian Evolution (Notre Dame University Press, 2006), and Bóg Abrahama i Whiteheada (The God of Abraham and Whitehead). Archbishop Życiński is a member of the Papal Academy of Culture and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences in Salzburg, as well as a consultor to the Congregation for Catholic Education in the Vatican. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and he also chairs the Bishops’ Council for the Laity and the Program Committee of Catholic Information Agency.