Alexandra Maryanski is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. She has authored or co-authored six books as well as coedited a large Handbook on Evolution and Society (Paradigm, 2015), in addition to authoring dozens of research articles. Her primary scholarly interests revolve around bringing data on primates, biological methods and models, network analysis, and neurology to the social sciences. She was one of the founders of contemporary evolutionary sociology as well as an early proponent of neurosociology. Her latest book, Emile Durkheim and the Birth of ↵the Gods (Routledge, forthcoming) brings the accumulated data on primates, methods from biology and network analysis, comparative neurology, and evolutionary theory to an assessment of Emile Durkheim’s theory on the origin and operation of religion in societies, as outlined in Durkheim’s essays after 1895 and in his monumental book in 1912, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Jonathan H. Turner is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and University Professor of the University of California system, as well as Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Riverside. He is primarily a general sociological theorist but has interests in many substantive areas of inquiry, including evolutionary sociology, neurosociology, and religion. He is the author of 41 books and more than 200 articles in theory and additional substantive areas, such as the sociology of emotions, stratification, ethnicity, and interpersonal behavior.