Berreby is a science writer born in France and raised in New York City. Berreby has been editor for the City University of New York, associate editor for the sciences at the New York Academy of Sciences, freelance journalist at Discover Magazine, and Science Writing Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, The New Republic, Slate, and Lingua Franca. Berreby won the 2006 Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Media Ecology Association for Us and Them. 

Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. Contemporary texts often cite Hume. He is best known for empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. His major text is A Treatise of Human Nature.

Galton was a Victorian polymath, statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, and eugenicist. Galton was related to Charles Darwin. He pioneered fingerprinting, the use of questionnaires to gather data, and other methods now considered pseudoscience.