Thomas Dixon is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He was the author of the first edition of this Very Short Introduction, which won the Dingle Prize in 2009, awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science to the best book for a wide readership. He is also the author of several other titles, including How to Get a First: The Essential Guide to Academic Success (2004), and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (2015).

Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He taught at universities in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for over a decade before accepting a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and shifting to work in public policy and science communication. He is the author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013) as well as several articles on science and religion from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.