Pallen - The rough guide to Evolution

For inspiration, advice and encouragement in starting out on writing this guide, I thank Carl Zimmer, Bob Henson and Robert Shepard. I am extremely grateful to all my colleagues at the University of Birmingham who read and commented on early drafts: Tony Beech (Psychology), Ian Fairchild (Geography), Nick Loman (Medical School), David Parker (Theology), Tim Reston (Earth Sciences), Peter Robinson (Theology), Paul Smith (Earth Sciences), Dov Stekel (Biosciences) and Susannah Thorpe (Biosciences). I count myself lucky to work in such a constructive and collaborative academic environment! I should also like to express gratitude to friends and fellow academics from outside my university who have read and commented on parts of the manuscript: Emma D, Lauri Lebo, Danny Levin, Ken Miller, Berni Munt, Ronald Numbers, Fred Spoor and John Van Wyhe. I owe a debt of gratitude to the tremendous efforts of the online community of pro-evolution/anti-creationism enthusiasts, whose work I have consulted in creating this guide. In particular, I thank all those who have contributed to the talk.origins archive, especially Doug Theobald for his marshalling of the evidence for macroevolution. I thank Nick Matzke for his enthusiastic eyewitness account of the Dover trial. I am grateful to my colleagues from the university of the train for their support and patience: David Blackbourn, John Bryson, Julia and Martin Ellis, Steve Kukureka, Steve Minchin, Edward Peck, Martin Russell and Mike Ward. The opinions expressed herein are my own (as are any errors) and the content does not necessarily reflect the views of any of those who have commented on it.

I am extremely grateful to all my collaborators at Rough Guides: to Andrew Lockett for championing the initial proposal, to Ruth Tidball for helpful feedback on my initial efforts, to Ed Wright for the great diagrams, Nikhil Agarwal for typesetting and, most of all, to Joe Staines for all his hard work in editing my wordy prose and for his patience in tolerating a sometimes irascible and pedantic author. I thank my research group (Lewis, Lori, Nick, Rasha, Rob and Sophie) for putting up with a supervisor preoccupied with book writing and I hope my children (Emma, Charlie, Tasha and Tom) will forgive me for so many dull weekends sacrificed to the writing of this guide.