John H. Evans

John H. Evans is a professor of sociology, Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences, associate dean of Social Sciences, and co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his B.A. from Macalester College and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He has been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, and has held visiting professorial fellowships or honorary professorships at the universities of Edinburgh, Muenster, Ben Gurion, and Queensland.

He specializes in examining debates that involve religion and science in the public sphere, trying to use social science to contribute to humanistic and ethical debates, and is particularly focused on ethical debates about human genetics. He is the author of two books that concern the history and nature of the field now called bioethics, two books about societal views of biotechnology, and a book on the micro-structure of the human gene editing debate. He is also the author of Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict Between Religion and Science (University of California Press, 2018) which argues that the religion and science debate should increasingly focus on moral conflict between religion and science.