Ervin Staub is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his PhD at Stanford University and taught at Harvard University. His work has focused on caring, helping, altruism and passivity in the face of others’ needs. His books on this topic are Positive social behavior and morality: Vol. 1. Social and personal influences, 1978; Vol. 2. Socialization and development, 1979 and two coedited volumes (Development and Maintenance of Prosocial Behavior: International Perspectives on Positive Morality, 1984; and Social and Moral Values: Individual and Societal Perspectives, 1989). He also edited Personality: Current Issues and Basic Research, 1980. Since the late 70’s he has also studied human destructiveness like genocide and ethnic violence (The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, and Patriotism in the Life of Individuals and Nations, in press.) and youth violence. His article, “The Psychology of Bystanders, Perpetrators and Heroic Helpers,” won the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Prize of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He has applied his work to public issues and concerns (e.g., police violence, racism, the war in Iraq, child rearing) in articles, lectures, workshops, teacher training, interviews with journalists, and radio and T.V. appearances.

Elliott Sober received his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1974. Since then he has been an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor and is currently Vilas Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His main area of research is the philosophy of science, focusing especially on philosophical questions raised by evolutionary biology. His publications include: The Nature of Selection, Reconstructing the Past, Core Questions in Philosophy; The Philosophy of Biology, and From a Biological Point of View. 

Robert H. Frank received his PhD in economics in 1972 from U.C. Berkeley. He holds a joint appointment as Professor of Economics in Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and as Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, where he has taught since 1972. His books include: Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (Oxford University Press, 1985); Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (W. W. Norton, 1988); Microeconomics and Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1991); and The Winner-Take-All Society (with Philip Cook, The Free Press, 1995). Besides teaching at Cornell, he taught math and science as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal from 1966 to 1968; he served as chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1978 to 1980; and during the 1992-93 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Piet Hut is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a Dutch-American astrophysicist, who divides his time between research in computer simulations of dense stellar systems and broadly interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from other fields in natural science to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy. His research interests relate to the origins of life and multidisciplinary approaches to cognition. 

Prof. Dr. Pier Luigi Luisi has been Professor of Macromolecular Chemistry at ETH-Zentrum, Institut für Polymere Departement Werkstoffe, one of the most prestigious technical universities of Europe, since the early 1980s. Earlier, he traveled and worked in Italy (where he got his degree), the United States, Sweden, and the former Soviet Union. His major interest in research is in the phenomena of self-assembly and self-organization of chemical systems, and on the emergence of novel functional properties as a consequence of the increase of the molecular complexity.

He is presently well known in the field of origin of life and origin of protocells, where he combines a hard-core experimental approach with the basic philosophical questions about minimal life. In this field, he is a follower of the theory of autopoiesis as proposed by Varela and Maturana, and developed it further into the experimental chemical autopoiesis. Professor Luisi is also responsible for an intense program that bridges science with humanities, the Cortona-Weeks project. He is author of over 300 scientific papers and also author of literature books, including children’s books.