It is a common human failing (to which I am susceptible) of emphasizing our own contribution to what goes well and finding extenuating circumstances for our participation in what ends poorly. I have found that the more I read, the less original I become, not in the sense intended by the sign on the wall of Francis Crick’s and Sydney Brenner’s laboratory “Reading rots the mind” but in the sense, that if I read broadly enough, I find that all of “my” ideas have occurred to somebody else. Who is to say whether these are independent inventions or whether there is some complex historical connection. Therefore, thanks to the many unacknowledged influences without whom this book would not have been written in quite the way it was. Ideas are communally generated, and this book was no exception. It is a reformulation of things I have read and things I have heard from many people, and to them, even though they are not otherwise acknowledged, thanks. Special thanks are due to Daniel Dennett, a friend of many years, without whom it definitely would not have been written, and to the participants in the Colloquium on the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things, who constantly challenged me to question my assumptions.
Peter Apari, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Richard Bondi, John Brockman, Rosa Cao, Kathleen Coleman, Bernard Crespi, Helena Cronin, Nick Davies, Daniel Dennett, Patrizia d’Ettorre, Thomas Dickins, Holly Elmore, Steve Frank, Andy Gardner, Shantanu Gaur, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Alan Grafen, David Hughes, Laurence Hurst, Justin Jungé, Elias Khalil, John Krebs, Jeffrey Lipshaw, Avantika Mainieri, Dakota McCoy, Jeff McKinnon, Latha Menon, Lucas Mix, Pavitra Muralidhar, Eric Nelson, Saul Newman, Martin Nowak, Samir Okasha, Manus Patten, Naomi Pierce, Jura Pintar, Susannah Porter, Robert Prior, Barbara Rice, Judith Ryan, Richard Schacht, Eric Schliesser, Karl Sigmund, James Simpson, Adam Smith, Adam Smith, Stephen Stearns, Kim Sterelny, Richard Thomas, Wenfei Tong, Robert Trivers, Francisco Úbeda de Torres, Carl Veller, Helen Vendler, Brianna Weir, Florence Westoby, Mark Westoby, Jonathan Wight, Jon Wilkins, Jason Wolf, and Adrian Young are all authors of this book.
And thanks to the rejectors of manuscripts who forced me to seek a better venue. You are unwitting authors of this book. Thanks to the choices of my ancestors that were, a few generations back, the choices of your ancestors, and to my daughter, Jesse Gudrun, who makes life worth living, and my sons, Cesar Aeneas and Liam Ulysses, wanderers in the wide world. Especial thanks to Eneida Pardo and a long-dead butterfly in Marilia who knew not what it did.