Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, science writer, and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first known genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. As well as writing for the science pages of The Guardian, he has written and presented many award-winning series and programs for the BBC as well as multiple books.

Cat Bohannon completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring.

Caspar Henderson has been a journalist and an editor: a contributor to BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, The Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and openDemocracy. His debut, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta, 2012), won the Roger Deakin Award of the Society of Authors and the Jerwood Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A New Map of Wonders (Granta) was published in 2017. A Book of Noises will be published by Granta in October 2023. He lives in Oxford.

Michael Muthukrishna is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE. He has been awarded a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholarship for outstanding early career research, and is a board member of the One Pencil Project which combines academic research with philanthropy. He uses a combination of mathematical and computational modelling, experimental research and data methods from psychology and economics to understand the psychological and evolutionary processes underlying culture and social change and to look for ways to apply this understanding to the challenges currently facing us as a species. A Theory of Everyone is his first book.

Jay Owens is a writer and researcher based in London. Her work explores dust and digital media—both complex, ambivalent ecosystems where grand technological dreams come to clash with messier practical realities. Jay is a former Research Director at the audience insight platform Pulsar, helping media and technology companies understand the present state of things online. Her research and comment on technology, media culture and behaviour has received coverage in the Guardian, WIRED, VICE and advertising press.