This book started life as an Open University text, and I am grateful to the members of the OU philosophy department, and particularly to the course's external assessor, Michael Clark of the University of Nottingham, for all their comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to Shirley Coulson, the course manager, and to Peter Wright, the editor, for a great deal of help and support in the writing and production of the text, as well as for their advice about the content.
During the writing of this version I was considerably helped by discussions with the members of the Darwin@LSE group, and I am particularly grateful to Helena Cronin for her detailed comments on the penultimate draft.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this book: D. C. Dennett (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Touchstone, by permission of Simon & Schuster; S. J. Gould (1985) 'Adam's Navel', from The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History, copyright © 1985 by Stephen Jay Gould, reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Penguin Books Ltd; R. Dawkins (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press; R. Wright (1994) The Moral Animal, copyright © 1994 by Robert Wright, reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and Little, Brown and Company (UK); R. Dawkins (1982) The Extended Phenotype, copyright © 1982 by W. H. Freeman and Company, used with permission; P. Kitcher (1985) Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, The MIT Press.
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