Acknowledgements

In producing the present work, we were fortunate to count on the active help and encouragement of friends and collaborators, whose advice and criticism were invaluable to us. We take this opportunity to express our thanks to the following people for their kind assistance.

Ana Muñoz, for her painstaking and tireless work on the book from start to finish; Rob Sewell, whose boundless enthusiasm sustained a long and difficult project, and whose research was fundamental to the sections on biology, genetics and evolution; Bryan Beckenham and John Pickard for their invaluable help with the section on chaos theory; we are indebted to Thanassis Olympios (Greece) for the section on geology and the evolution of life; Bosse Öberg (Sweden) for the material on religion; we would especially lik to thank Eric J. Lerner (USA) for his valuable comments on the “Big Bang” and related matters; Julianna Grant for her assistance with “The Language and Thought of the Child” and Anne Tanner for her material on genetics. Finally, we would like to thank Gareth Pilkington, Sue Norris, Ruth Fallon, Michael Roberts, Steve Jones and Harry Whittaker for proof-reading, technical work and comments, and Alastair Wilson for the cover design.