Dr. Melvin Konner, MD, Ph.D.: Darwin, Dogma & the Religious Experience

Religion and the religious experience through the lens of social sciences and evolutionary biology.

Melvin Konner, MD, Ph.D. is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University, where he teaches Anthropology, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, and Jewish Studies. He attended Brooklyn College, CUNY, and his MD and PhD are from Harvard.

Konner’s books include: Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews and The Jewish Body (Nextbook “Jewish Encounters”; An American Library Association Brody Award “Honor Book”), The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit; Becoming a Doctor; The Evolution of Childhood (one of The Atlantic’s Five Best Books of 2010), Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, among other books.

In addition to his many books, Konner has had regular columns in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and has written for Newsweek, The Forward, Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. He has also translated the African poems of the great Yiddish poet Avraham Sutzkever.

Konner has visited Israel 13 times and lectured around the country as a Fulbright Senior Specialist for six weeks in 2011. In 2016 he was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and past fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.