Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World

Acknowledgments

xiii No writing can be done in isolation from the influences and assistance of others. The greatest help I’ve had is from my wife and scientific partner Beth Raff. I am deeply grateful for her love and encouragement, for her willingness to read endless manuscript versions , for the clarity of her thinking, and for her wielding of a merciless redpencil.Hercommentsexposedembarrassinglybadorganizationand muzzy thinking wherever they hid among the grass of unobjectionable words in the acreage of manuscript pages. My sister, Mimi Jakoi, and my cousins Monique Dufresne and Michelle Ricard shared their memories of our shared childhood and helped me find family histories. I thank Ed Fraser and George Glauber for providing me with information that helped me understand my father’s emigration to Canada from Austria in 1938. Manypeopleappearinthisbook,includingfamily,friends,students, teachers, and colleagues. I remember them all for enriching my life and intellectual growth, and the science I write about. I owe a great deal to my academic home, Indiana University, which has made it possible for me as a faculty member in biology to work in a rich and intellectually excitingenvironmentamongadmiredcolleagues.Ialsohavetoacknowledge a parallel universe at the University of Sydney. The School of Biological Sciences at Sydney has generously allowed Beth and me, and our students, to do field work and research in their facilities each year since 1986. The generosity of the school, the heads of school who served during the time we worked in Sydney, and so many colleagues in and out of Acknowledgments xiv Acknowledgments biology in Sydney has given us the ability to conduct a research program dependant on evolution in the lost continent. This story could not be told without all that our Australian friends and collaborators have done withsuchgraceandzest.I’mespeciallygratefultoDonandJoAnderson, who made it possible for me to start my research in Sydney. Heather Sowden, Craig Sowden, Hamlet Giragossyan, Margaret Gilchrist, Les Edwards, Mark Ahern, Michael Joseph, Basil Panayotakos, Malcolm Ricketts, and many other members of the Sydney faculty and staff have selflessly helped us make our field and lab work possible. Maria Byrne has been a priceless long-term collaborator. I thank Robyn Stuchbury and Noel Tait for all our times spent together in Australia, for teaching us about Australian biology and providing a superb color photograph of a living peripatus. The Women’s College at the University of Sydney has provided a welcoming home away from home to Beth and me and our students for over two decades of our research. I am also grateful to Haris LessiosoftheSmithsonianTropicalResearchInstituteforhostinguson a crucial research trip in Panama. As always, as scientists we owe an enormous debt to our graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and technicians, who throughout our careers have made meaningful research possible. I acknowledge that debt. Too many people have been part of the effort to list them all here. Some are cited specifically in the book and in the bibliography. I want to thank Mary Andrews, whose technical abilities made much of our Australian work possible, and Pat Anderson for her outstanding work as editorial assistant for Evolution & Development and for her help with the manuscript of this book. Cited or not, I prize you all. I want to acknowledge Editorial Director Robert Sloan and the staff of Indiana University Press, who have done so much to make the book a physical reality. I thank Angela Burton for guiding me through the process, and Marilyn Augst for the creation of the index. I am indebted to the external reviewers of the book manuscript, Brian Hall and Billie Swalla, for their comments and advice. Finally, I thank Tom Jorstad, Smithsonian Institution, for arranging the use of a photograph of a 500-million-year-old precursor of living peripatus in the fossil record. I amgratefulto colleaguesPhilDonoghue, ShuhaiXiao, Deiter Waloszek, and Ron Blakey for supplying images from their scientific works, and to Acknowledgments xv paleo artist Raúl Martin, who made available his painting of Acanthastega for use on the cover. I thank Jim Gehling and the South Australian Museum for showing us Ediacaran life and preservation through the museum’s spectacular fossils. Beth has reminded me to say that any surviving errors are mine alone. This page intentionally left blank ONCE WE ALL HAD GILLS This page intentionally left blank ...