“[I sent it to Evolution] because it was about evolution! That’s all. You know, all this business today of trying to figure out what’s the best journal to put your paper in, that didn’t exist in the 60s.”

“[The figures were drawn] by hand! In those days we had sets of frames that we used to draw lines, curves and letters, but they were all carefully traced by hand.”

“[The figures were made] on one of the first Macs. I think this was made in a stats programme called Systat, which I don’t think a lot of people use today. The other thing with this data is that, I compiled all of it, from the literature and museums, and published it. At the same time, there was a huge project led by a person,who has unfortunately passed away, called Ted Parker, who was one of the best neotropical ornithologists. He had compiled a huge dataset on ecological attributes and geographical distributions of neotropical birds. So we joined forces and that way all my data went into his database and I could use the compiled thing. That was published in a book, along with a floppy disk with all the data, by Chicago Press.”

“Nature only allowed a limited number of references. [...] I think it was 20 max.”

“Actually, relatively shortly afterwards, in late 2007, graphics processing units – GPUs – became programmable. [...] implementing these models on GPUs just massively increases processing power available to us. So, instead of being able to simulate hundreds of individuals, we could simulate, literally, hundreds of thousands of them. We could also use this extra processing power, not just to look at the mechanism of interest, but also the evolution of these types of individual strategies. That was a very, very important development – the massive increase in computational power afforded by massive cheap parallel programming units. That really allowed up to explore and develop these ideas in powerful ways.”

“At night I would fill in data sheets, which, back in Chicago, I would type onto cards that could be read by a mainframe computer.”

“At that point, I was actually just leaving for Costa Rica for several months. So I asked them, can I give this [revised manuscript] back to you in three months? At that time, in Costa Rica, I had no access to email for three months straight, so there was no way to resubmit it. They said yes.”

“At that stage the normal thing was to make them with a Rotring-ink drawing pen, ruler and a series of plastic stencils with letters and numbers that you could trace. And then that led subsequently to the use of sheets of transfer. So, you could buy sheets of transfers of either letters or numbers, and those started to look a bit smarter. But there’s no comparison with what one could do now. Now, it’s wonderful to be able to produce letters or figures or what have you by all the software packages that are available. I should say, when one was doing this, much of the analysis was done by hand as well. In the later stages of the work, we were doing all our statistical tests by computer. But quite a bit of this stage, when we were working in the early 70s, the tests were basically done with a calculator, manually. So, I was always very fond of using Siegel’s Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, and that told you how to work out the specific tests – Spearman rank correlations, Mann Whitney test and so on. And we would do this by hand with a calculator.”

“At that time it was more common than it is now for research papers to be single-authored, and my advisor (Dr. Helmut Mueller) did not work on bumble bees and never visited my research site.”

“At that time we didn’t use the computer. Till today, I do all my writing, even of books, by first hand-writing, then by dictating and getting it typed into a computer. Still in the very old-fashioned way.”

“At the time of the study, most researchers in Ecology had not yet fallen prey to that insane obsession with citations that now plagues the field, so we did not even consider that possibility of becoming highly cited.”

“At the time, digital photography was brand new. We had one of the first digital SLR cameras, but it was in the lab. We didn’t take it out in the field. It was up on this tripod so that you could get a really precise photo of these things. It is really easy to do all that now, but, at the time, it was a little more challenging.”

“At the time, there were many fewer journals, and, after our first two rejections, Evolutionary Ecology was just about the only place we could have sent an evolutionary theory paper that did not use explicit population genetics and still have much hope that biologists might pay attention to it.”

“Back at Stony Brook, I would go over to the medical school library, which was not on the main campus, and look up in the giant books of the Science Citation Index, which was printed in a multi-volume set on very, very thin, like, almost transparent paper, because it was all printed out—“online” did not exist. And I would look up every couple of months to see – did anyone cite this paper?”

“Back in the early 70s, there was less of a division between Ecology and Evolution, and most theoreticians worked in both fields.”

“Back in those days, there was no Twitter or other things like that, so I don’t think one was particularly aware of how a paper was received, until after people began to cite it. I remember being on holiday in Wales actually, when it came out, and finding a copy of Nature at a news agent.”

“By letters! Remember, this is 1986-87, so a lot of stuff was done the old-fashioned way by exchanging letters.”

“Coevolution today is just a normal thing. As soon as you start talking about it in animals and plants out there you realise there are many many examples where one species has evolutionarily reacted to another and then the other one has evolutionarily reacted to the first one and you go back and forth and back and forth and you find yourself with coevolution. That’s just the view today, a standard way of looking at the world. In 1962-63, that was a very novel way of looking at the world.”

“Dennis Slice was our IT person. He had gotten a PhD in Evolutionary Biology, working with Jim Rohlf in my department and then was working as the IT person, running the computer systems and giving a lot of computational and statistical advice in the department at that time (he eventually went on to become a noted researcher and Professor in South Carolina and then at Florida State University). So one of the really challenging questions which Laura Morrow came up with a solution for was: we realized that a lot of the data was not published in tables; It was published in figures. And so we thought, how can we get this data? It’s in figures, what are we going to do? And she said, she had been taking a course with Professor Jim Rohlf, and he had mentioned that people could digitize figures and extract the data. And she said, we could do that with this paper, and then Dennis Slice helped us to actually figure out how to do that. And then Joe Walsh did a lot of that because he had amazingly steady hand-eye coordination. He did a lot of digitizing. So this was very much a collaborative effort.”

“Editors these days might not let me get away with such a chatty style. But I enjoy reading papers where you feel you are out there with the researcher, watching the animal and eavesdropping on the study. These days, of course, statistical analysis and quantification and use of computers has changed the way we do research for the better. There is absolutely no question about that. But I do think that people quite often get beguiled by numbers and statistics and lose track of the natural history, which I think should always be the starting point. I think observation from natural history is the most interesting thing and if you then can combine that with statistics and modelling then that’s great. But complicated statistics and numbers for the sake of it just makes the whole study dull.”