“It was a practical issue. Remember, at that time we were going and photocopying papers out of journals. And the idea in meta-analysis at that time was more to come up with a defined, unbiased list of papers that you would want to include and then search those out. We also only looked at a certain number of journals; major ecological journals. You wouldn’t do a meta-analysis that way now because there’s electronic access, and not only access to the journal articles, but to the databases for searching for articles. Those databases didn’t really exist, you know. Web of Science didn’t exist. Science Citation Index was just, it was in paper and it was very awkward to use; you couldn’t search for keywords. So it was strictly a practical issue and it was still at the very edge of our capacity to accumulate all of that information.”

“It was almost evening when the adult male langur I called “Mug”, who had been stalking this mother-infant pair for some days, caught hold of her infant and was running with him in his jaws along the rooftop of the Phiroze School, as two older females in the group (“Sol” and “Pawless”) rushed at him to try and retrieve his victim. Years later, the self-sacrificing bravery of these old females at or near the end of their reproductive careers would play an important role in the development of my thinking about the roles group members other than mothers played in human evolution”

“It was an experiment that I set up for an entirely other purpose, at the beginning of my postdoc, and then after it had run for a few years, we started seeing results that, I guess, we could have anticipated had we thought about it more, but they were pretty dramatic.”

“It was considerably before molecular biology and the experimental methods at the time seem remarkably antique. It might be described as the kitchen phase of experimental biology!”

“It was hard work! But at the same time, it was exciting and interesting. We had this interesting experimental technique; no one had done anything like this before. I was learning a huge amount that no one had known before. I was watching the colonisation of these islands, and almost every day found something new and interesting. It was grueling, very grueling, sometimes physically unpleasant. Especially the sharks and mosquitoes! But it was so exciting and important, and I was glad to do it.”

“It was mostly because of logistics. It’s flat, unlike some of these other sites, which are straight up the sides of mountains or deep into canyons. It’s much more accessible than some of our other sites from where I was living at the time. It didn’t take many hours or half a day or more to get to the site. I didn’t have to camp out there for long periods of time. We also had more laboratory access from that site. But, I think the biggest advantage is it was quite clear that that site was very strongly mutualistic, and we could ask how the interactions between the plants and the moths evolve when there is strong mutualism. Finally, there were so many moths and so many plants, we could work on those populations without any concern at all about damaging the populations.”

“It was not easy at that time to see the reaction [to the paper]. Now, you can see it quite quickly by the number of downloads and the social media reaction.”

“It was really very, very large and challenging to do that analysis. And of course, in those days, nothing was electronic. We were photocopying all the articles from, you know, from the print versions of the journals that we got at the university library and, you know, doing things in a way that you wouldn’t do them now. And the statistics also is much more simplistic than what we would do nowadays.”

“it was such a big data set, and also, the statistics of it very tricky. It was a split plot design, which nobody knew how to analyze in those days; at least none of my acquaintances knew. This was of course before the internet, so I couldn’t just go on and, you know, find somebody with an R script that knew how to do it. So that stuck me back a bit. I had lots of conversations with people about how to analyze the data. A few told me, oh no, you can’t do it. I said, well, you know, of course we can do it; we just have to figure out a way.”

“It would be interesting to revisit and update it and to broaden it to include more recent work on functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and a lot more island material, and to make a serious effort to expand to more explicitly include aquatic and especially marine systems, but that sort of synthesis would probably require a monograph to do it justice.”

“It’s funny because, I think, only in the last maybe 15 years, maybe less than that, has this [criteria to decide authorship order] changed. So it used to be that in Molecular Biology, the last author was the person whose lab it was in, and so their name went on everything. But in Ecology and Evolution, no! In Ecology and Evolution, the first author was the person who was really responsible for the work. And then after that, it was the second author who had done the second most contributions, the third the third most and so on and so forth. And it’s only very recently – well, I’m not sure whether you think 10 years is recent or not – it’s only within about the last 10 years or so that that’s changed. Now last author is viewed as an influential authorship in Ecology and Evolution, as well as in Molecular Biology.”

“It’s still really relevant today. But of course, there is this big big chunk missing, which is: why birds in high conditions should breed earlier or be bigger or have longer tails. A lot of unfinished work. So if you are reading this paper today, make sure you understand why heritable traits don’t evolve, and then go back to the literature of the last 30 years to understand why condition correlates with these traits.”

“Its main findings have been remarkably robust. For instance, we had another debate after the first one, with Brad Cardinale and others who published a review paper in Nature in 2006. Their paper suggested again that biodiversity effects in experiments were largely driven by the sampling effect. Andy and I didn’t agree on their conclusions, but instead of fighting against each other, we decided to work together to perform a meta-analysis of all the grassland experiments that had the appropriate data. That joint work was published in PNAS in 2007. Andy and I were convinced that complementarity was important even in their data based on our previous experience. Brad and others were convinced that this was not the case. So we decided to analyse the data together using our method. It took one year for Brad to accept that we were right but in the end he did, which I view as a valuable sign of scientific honesty. Now we have more and more examples showing that complementarity is the leading factor in biodiversity experiments, so the conclusions of our paper hold more than ever. Our method does not solve everything, it has some limitations, some of which are even mentioned in the paper. But overall I would say that both the method and the results of our paper have stood the test of time particularly well.”

“Jack [Bradbury] has an unusual attitude towards his graduate students, in that he would not insist on being a co-author on their papers. He would agree to be a co-author only if he thought that he had contributed an equal amount to the work. In the case of this paper, he contributed to the writing, but I did all the work. In fact, those first two weeks before my OTS [Organization for Tropical Studies] course was the only time we were ever in the field together. So he had very little idea of what I was doing until after I had done it. But I did ask him to be a co-author, because in my mind, I would have never done what I did if it weren’t for his advice. But he said – you did it, you deserve it, you should take all the credit.”

“Jan is my wife. We’d often spend long evenings painting model eggs together. In the paper we also acknowledge Bruce Campbell, who was one of the best nest recorders in the country. He came across one of our experimental nests and reported our model egg as a real cuckoo egg! So, unwittingly he convinced us that our model eggs were realistic.”

“Jean Gladstone [was] my laboratory assistant, charged with handling the project data files and running the analysis programs at the campus computer center (no desktop at the time).”

“Jennifer Nielsen had been a fisheries field technician for US Forest Service, then came to graduate school at Berkeley. She was a fish-whisperer, and an expert in electro-fishing. I knew nothing about electro-fishing, so she advised me on which ones to buy and then she taught me how to do this so we don’t harm the fish. You have to be very light in your touch. Jennifer Nielsen – we called her ‘the goddess of shock’.”

“Jens really felt that it deserved to be read by a broad audience. Nature was just the first one we thought we would try, and we got lucky. I, previously, had a pretty, harrowing experience with what was really my first first-author paper, which I first tried to publish in Proceedings of the Royal Society, and eventually published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 2002. The reviewer at Proceedings was absolutely scathing; absolutely destroyed the paper. His quote was, “I’ve seen more interesting patterns in slime molds”. I thought he really missed the point of the paper. This paper was about the emergence of group dynamics, and properties such as collecting memory and spatial sorting within groups. And because that was my first paper that I was really writing myself, I lost confidence after reading the review. I wrote to Simon Levin and said, I’ve got this paper that’s just been rejected, and he suggested that I send it to the Journal of Theoretical Biology because it has published some seminal work like 'Geometry of the Selfish Herd' by Hamilton. So, I sent it there and it was accepted within a week. I remember I wrote to the editor – I don’t remember who it was – and said, this was my first paper, and I haven’t received any reviews, and it would be very helpful for me to see the reviews. I didn’t get a reply, and then it was just published. So, despite the initial hammering that has become one of the most cited papers in Animal Behavior research.”

“Jeremy [Jackson] has told me that, when he was at Yale as a graduate student, he thought our ’72 paper was all wrong; absolutely wrong. And that there are examples that we gave in that paper that were not convincing or were not really well analyzed; not really scientifically done. So, years later, he comes along and he looks at the bryozoans that are alive, he’s doing some molecular stuff with them, and working with Alan Chatham, a palaeontologist, going down the last 20 million years to look at these lineages of these species that are still alive today. And he says, you guys are absolutely dead right. And I said, what about the turnovers and, you know, do things happen more-or-less across lineages at about the same time? He said, absolutely. So, I always go to Jeremy’s paper. I just tell people read Jeremy, because he was a profound doubter, he did the work at the level that he thought we should have done our work at, and he found out that we were dead right. And had the honesty and courage to publish it.”

“John Thompson was the one who invited me to participate in a symposium on the geographic mosaic of co-evolution for the American Society of Naturalists. The society has a vice-presidential symposium every year, and John was the vice president. He was very encouraging. I thought my work didn’t fit very well in the symposium but John convinced me otherwise. He is also a big advocate of my work, which I very much appreciate.”