Hopi E. Hoekstra received her B.A. in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in 2000 as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. For her dissertation work, she received the Ernst Mayr Award from the Society for Systematic Biology. She then moved to the University of Arizona as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow where she studied the genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice and was awarded the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator...

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His first book, Paper and Iron (1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History (1997), was a UK bestseller....

Russell F. Doolittle is in the Departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, San Diego. His long time research interests have centered around the structure and evolution of proteins. In recent years his experimental work has dealt with the X-ray crystallography of fibrinogen and fragments of fibrin, but he has also maintained a sustained interest in the evolution of blood coagulation, a project he initiated while a graduate student....

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover,Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and two grandsons. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work...

Eric H. Davidson is the Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. degree from Rockefeller University. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the AAAS. The major focus of research in his laboratory is on gene networks that control development and their evolution. Areas of research include the transcriptional mechanisms by which specification of...

Brian Charlesworth is Professor and Head of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD in genetics at Cambridge in 1969, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago. He subsequently worked at the Universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Chicago, moving to Edinburgh as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences....

Thomas Cech was raised and educated in Iowa (B.A. in chemistry from Grinnell College, 1970). He obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and then engaged in postdoctoral research in the department of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978 he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 1988 and Distinguished Professor of...

Sean Carroll is Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Carroll's research has centered on those genes that control body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. He is the author of the new book Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (2009) and of The Making of the Fittest (2006) which won the Phi Beta Kappa 2007 Science Book...

Carlos D. Bustamante is Professor of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University. His research focuses on analyzing genome wide patterns of variation within and between species to address fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and medical genetics. His group works on a variety of organisms and model systems ranging from humans and other primates to domesticated plant and animals to large scale simulations of microevolution. Much of his research...

Frances H. Arnold is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on evolution of biological systems in the laboratory. Frances Arnold has co-authored 220 scientific publications and edited several books on protein engineering and laboratory protein evolution. She also has more than 40 patents and patent applications. Prof. Arnold has received numerous awards and honors, including...