Alexandra Maryanski is research professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside and Emerita Professor of Sociology. She was trained in anthropology and primatology with advanced degrees in interdisciplinary social science and social network analysis. She has authored or co-authored seven books among them On the Origins of Societies by Natural Selection, The Emergence and Evolution of Religion by Means of Natural Selection, and Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods along with many dozens of research articles. She has been at the forefront of two intellectual movements in sociology: contemporary evolutionary sociology and neurosociology. Her primary scholarly interests revolve around bringing data on primates, biological methods and models, network analysis, and neurology to the social sciences.