Melvin Konner

Melvin Konner

Melvin Konner is a Professor of Anthropology and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. After attending Brooklyn College, he received his Ph.D. and then his M.D. from Harvard, where he taught before coming to Emory. He lived for two years in Botswana, where he studied the !Kung San hunter-gatherers. In addition to his more than ten books (including The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, Becoming a Doctor, and The Evolution of Childhood), he has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Psychology Today, and the New York Review of Books, as well as for Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Child Development, and elsewhere. He has received research fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright Foundations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has appeared before the U.S. Senate on health care reform; has lectured in the medical humanities at Yale, the Mayo Clinic, and Vanderbilt medical schools; and has lectured on evolutionary medicine, the evolution of childhood, and other topics at universities around the world. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he won the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology in the Media Award.