The creation of this Handbook owes a special thanks to friends and colleagues who offered suggestions about coverage, provided reviews of individual chapters, and helped me on the long journey. For the first edition of the Handbook (2005), these include Sean Conlan, Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Todd DeKay, Randy Diehl, Diana Fleischman, Steve Gangestad, Martie Haselton, Sarah Hill, Joonghwan Jeon, Barry X. Kuhle, Steven Pinker, David Schmitt, Todd Shackelford, Don Symons, John Tooby, Jerry Wakefield, and Margo Wilson. Their contributions carry over to this second edition.
Cristine Legare played a key role for the current edition of the Handbook. In addition to generous feedback on several chapters, she was instrumental in convincing me to broaden the scope of the Handbook to include topics such as cultural evolution, social group cognition, learning over ontogeny, and religion—domains of huge importance to human affairs.
Dan Conroy-Beam deserves singling out for special and enormous thanks. He helped me shepherd this Handbook at all stages of the 3-year process: decisions about key contributors, providing key reviews of a dozen or so chapters, tracking the status of each chapter, and offering key suggestions about final organization. I owe Dan a great debt.
Many scholars generously provided external reviews of draft of one or more chapters: Bill von Hippel, Anne Campbell, Pascal Boyer, Daniel Nettle, Ray Hames, Joe Henrich, Ryan McKay, Coren Apicella, Alyssa Crittenden, Willem Frankenhuis, Todd Shackelford, H. Clark Barrett, Kristina Durante, David Rakison, Elizabeth Cashdan, Steve Gangestad, Dave Schmitt, Cristine Legare, Randy Nesse, Jonathan Gotschall, Josh Tybur, Dominic Johnson, Aaron Sell, Gad Saad, Robert Kurzban, Jerone Wakefield, Kelly Asao, and Rebecca Burch. I am much in their debt.
An editor could not ask for a more superlative team than those at John Wiley & Sons. Patricia Rossi's unflagging enthusiasm for the Handbook provided the inspiration needed to bring the project to fruition, and Rachel Livsey and Amanda Orenstein helped enormously in the final stages.
I owe a special thanks to Steven Pinker for furnishing the foreword, Don Symons for writing a special essay for the section on mating, Martin Daly for providing an introduction to the section on parenting and kinship, and Richard Dawkins for furnishing the afterword. Most important, I thank the authors who provided the 52 chapters that form the core of the Handbook. Within their domains of expertise, they help the next generation of scientists by showing the light and the way.