Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University. One of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. Over 500 articles in academic journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, Journal of Physiology.

Addy Pross is a professor of chemistry at the Ben Gurion University where he was first appointed in 1973. An expert in chemical reactivity, he proposed the concept of dynamic kinetic stability (DKS) as a distinct stability kind, quite different to thermodynamic stability, and which can assist in bridging between the physical and biological worlds. Pross is of the view that a major challenge facing both the physical and biological sciences is the creation of a unified conceptual framework able to integrate the two material worlds. A central idea in his thinking is that an ahistoric understanding of the origin of life process is the material link that can assist in bringing about that integration.

Amelia is a zoologist, interested in animal behaviour and cognition. She works  at the intersect of behavioural physiology, ethology, and biosemiotics, with an emphasis on teleology and agency as being key evolutionary processes.

Abir (Andrei) Igamberdiev has worked as a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada since 2007. His research is focused on the organization of plant metabolism, the conceptual development of foundations of theoretical biology, and on history and philosophy of science. He has introduced an evolutionary concept that accounts for the underlying logic of the generation of new coding systems and describes the main codepoietic events in the course of progressive biological and social evolution. The evolutionary complexification is viewed as a metasystem transition that results in the increase of external work performed by the system and in the maximization of its power via synergistic effects. 

De Loof worked as professor of biology at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium since 1973. His major interest is the evolution and mode of action of the endocrine system of animals. Not only in animals, but in all living systems, the sender-receiver or communicating compartment is the universal unit of structure and function. The prokaryotic cell is the smallest such unit. This approach enables to plausibly define ‘Life’ and to deduce the various parameters instrumental to the evolution of communication activity, which represents the very essence of being alive. To evolve into an all-round theory of evolution, the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis needs a ‘software upgrade’.

Atsuko Sato is Associate Professor at Ochanomizu University and Tohoku University since 2021. Her major interest is environmental impact on animal morphogenesis and evolution.

Dr. Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University. A practicing oncologist seeing 30-40 cancer patients weekly, she also directs a basic cancer research lab with hundreds of original publications in high profile journals. She met with President Clinton designing Breakthrough Developments in Science and Technology and with VP Joe Biden for the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Her latest book, THE FIRST CELL And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last was published in October 2019. Her life is devoted to early detection and prevention of cancer.

Ben Bradley has worked at the intersection of biology with the human sciences since the 1970s. His pioneering collaborative research on infancy shows that young infants participate in all-baby groups – communicating with and responding to more than one other baby at once – from before the time at which they establish their first attachment. A parallel strand of research concerns Darwin’s writings, leading to publications on the literary structure of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), and a film ‘Darwin's Babies,’ which received its world premiere at ‘Darwin 2009: A Celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin's Birth’ in Cambridge, UK. In 2020 he published the first ever book-length examination of Darwin’s approach to psychological topics, Darwin’s Psychology: The Theatre of Agency.

Corrado Spadafora's laboratory originally discovered that mature sperm cells from a variety of species share the ability to spontaneously take up exogenous DNA molecules and deliver them to oocytes at fertilization: they called that phenomenon cell-mediated sperm-mediated gene transfer (SMGT). That feature was subsequently exploited, in theirs and other laboratories, to generate genetically modified animals in different species.

Known for his work in establishing a theoretical framework for the study of consciousness in non-human animals, Edelman has, most recently, studied the neural correlates of consciousness in non-human animals, as well as the link between mitochondrial trafficking and neuromodulation in the mammalian brain. Currently, he is exploring octopus visual perception using a video-based psychophysical approach. He hopes to combine such psychophysical studies with electrophysiological recording in free behaving animals. This approach will reveal neural signatures of octopus visual perception that may be compared with those already characterized in vertebrates; It may also yield insights regarding the evolution of complex vision.

David Obon is an author, scientist, and educator from Barcelona who has worked in the field of complexity and evolutionary theory for more than 15 years. His research seeks to reconstruct the unity of knowledge and discover new relationships that allow us to understand the world from a more integrated perspective. He considers that the prime mover of evolution is a self-organized dynamic based on fundamental selection of innovation capacity. This hypothesis, as he argues in detail in his latest book ‘Evolution: The Invention of Creativity’, fits with scientific data and enables to understand the fundamental logic that guides cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

Didier Raoult, MD PhD, Director of one of the largest research groups in infectious diseases and microbiology. He had his MD in 1981 in Marseille and PhD in 1985 in Montpellier, France. He is the author and co-author of more than 2000 scientific publications. Didier Raoult is devoted to research in infectious diseases, especially in the field of emerging microbes. His team isolated for the first time over 20% of bacteria isolated in humans, more than 50% of archaes from man, and his team is the origin of the discovery of four viral families, the first virus giant Mimivirus, and also Marseillevirus, Faustovirus the virophage, the first virus infecting viruses by making them sick. 

Didier is the most cited microbiologist in Europe according to ISI and was cited more the 5000 times in 2012. He has trained more than 457 foreign scientists in his lab since 1998 with more than 1950 articles referred in ISI or Pubmed. He is the more prolific French scientist, anytime, in any field.

The basic research Didier Raoult carries out is devoted to evolution and it goes mostly against neo-Darwinian theory.

Ehud Lamm is a philosopher and historian of biology. He studies foundational issues in biology using a combination of theoretical biology, modeling and philosophical analysis.  His current research interests are the evolution of the genome, evolution of language and norms, scientific modeling, and evolutionary narratives. 

Peterson works at the intersection between history, philosophy, and biology, especially the development of evolutionary theory in France, Germany, and the UK since the nineteenth century. He first became interested in an alternative to the standard model of evolution after stumbling across C. H. Waddington’s Strategy of the Genes (1957) in the early-2000s. Since then, he’s dug through archives in five countries searching for the originators of Third Way evolution and the twists and turns on the road to our modern conceptions.

Keller is a physicist and author with interest in physics, molecular biology, history and philosophy of modern biology, gender and science.  She received her Ph.D in physics from Harvard (1963). 

Since 1992 Frank Ryan have worked in theoretical evolutionary biology. He introduced and defined new concepts such as “viral symbiosis”, “genomic creativity” and “holobiontic genome”, which have been adopted and further developed by other colleagues. In particular he has co-written about the definition and extrapolation of these themes with evolutionary virologists, Professor Luis Villarreal, of UC Irvine and Professor Erik Larsson of Uppsala University.

František Baluška is interested in plant roots, cytoskeleton, polarity and tip-growth, endocytosis, vesicle recycling, plant signaling, plant behavior, and evolution of the eukaryotic cell. He has founded together with the Landes Bioscience two new scientific journals: Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative & Integrative Biology. He is also editor of the book series entitled ‘Signaling and Communication in Plants’ at the Springer Verlag. He is the author of over 160 papers.

Müller is a theoretical biologist who concentrates on the role of developmental processes in evolutionary innovation. He advocates an expanded framework of evolution and has published numerous papers and books on the ongoing change in evolutionary theory.

Giorgio Bernardi pioneered a new branch of biology which was going to be called Genomics. Indeed, in 1959 he embarked in investigations on the organization and evolution of the genome which he continued since and he is still pursuing.

Caetano-Anollés is professor of bioinformatics at the University of Illinois and an expert in the fields of computational biology and evolutionary and comparative genomics. His lab seeks creative ways to mine, visualize and integrate data from structural and functional genomic research. His current interests focus on the origin, evolution and structure of biological molecules, chemistries, networks, and functions for synthetic biology. He is using his expertise in bioinformatics and biochemistry to compute the origin of life and the genetic code. He advocates for a world of coevolving molecules, dissipation of energy and information, and emergence of structure.

Jacques Demongeot has worked as professor of medical informatics at the University Grenoble Alpes since 1970. As expert in theoretical biology, he proposed the new concept of primitive RNA rings as primitive structures at early life steps.

Jan Spitzer is a retired industrial R&D manager (synthetic latexes and emulsion polymerization processes) with expertise in thermodynamics and the stability of aqueous colloids. His theory of screened electrostatic forces suggests that prokaryotic cells are sol-gel systems with semiconducting electrolyte channels—a wetware of crowded, concentrated proteins and nucleic acids regulated by post-translational modifications. Recently, he re-conceptualized origin-of-life research including the evolution of single-celled organisms using physicochemical approach that explains both Charles Darwin’s genetic gradualism and Lynn Margulies’ saltations (symbioses).  

Joachim Bauer is a German molecular biologist , neurobiologist and physician with training as an internist , a psychotherapist and psychiatrist . His specialty is psychosomatic medicine . He teaches as a professor at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. Bauer is the author of several scientific papers. He is the author of The Cooperative Gene: Evolution as a creative process.

(Work in progress) Prior to retirement, he lectured in Biological Anthropology at Oxford. He has published over 100 articles in prominent scientific journals on the topics of animal learning, its role in evolution, and more recently on niche construction. A Leverhulme fellowship led to his ongoing collaboration with Kevin Laland and Marc Feldman, and to the present project on niche construction.

John Mattick is the Professor of RNA Biology at UNSW Sydney. He is best known for his work on noncoding RNAs, especially long noncoding RNAs, which he has shown are widely expressed from genetic loci termed enhancers and act to organize the trajectories of multicellular differentiation and development. As a consequence, most of the human genome is functional, not junk as widely assumed, with profound implications for the understanding of genetic programming and evolution. He has published over 300 scientific articles and reviews, which have been cited >100,000 times.