John H. Evans is Professor for Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a Post-doctoral Fellow at Yale, a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and has held a visiting professorial fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

His research focuses on religion, culture, politics and science. His first book, Playing God? Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (2002, University of Chicago Press) offers an explanation for the emergence of the profession of bioethics in public bioethical debate, and an explanation for why these debates are structured as they are. His second book, titled Contested Reproduction: Genetic Technologies, Religion and Public Debate (2010, University of Chicago Press), examines how ordinary religious people in the U.S. talk about reproductive genetic technologies. It also is a contribution to one of Evans’ other interests – polarization in public debates – in that it examines whether or not people will want to debate this issue in the future, or whether they will consider it to be a hopelessly polarized issue like the abortion debate. He has another book forthcoming titled The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) that uses sociological reasoning to examine the history of bioethics in more detail and offers a solution to what Evans sees as the crisis in bioethics debate.

Homepage of Professor Evans