“Kaoru [Kitajima] was a physiological ecologist. She invited me to use her lab rather than just running around with my van - my lab on wheels - and so I set up shop in her lab and collaborated with her on a related paper [...] she also let me stay in her house when she would be off working in the tropics in Panama. She ended up being my local host there and became a good friend.”

“Keep in mind that these were early days in primatology. I doubt that my casual observational methods would be acceptable today.”

“Keep in mind that this was one of the first phylogenetic studies – and certainly the first in comparative physiology – that made an explicit attempt to look at the evolutionary patterns of multiple quantitative traits for a clade of organisms. In that sense, it was pioneering, but the methods we used certainly don’t approach contemporary standards, and the phylogeny available to us at the time was very crude. Even so, the fundamental co-evolutionary questions we asked are still valid and are still interesting to those interested in evolutionary physiology.”

“Let me say one other thing. Yeah. In today’s attribution ethics, probably three quarters of the people in those acknowledgements would have been co-authors, if the paper were written today, because we tend to include more co-authors now, than we did then. In those days, the authors were the people who were the leaders, and if they had a technician or two, or a colleague who they had lunch with and talked about their work, they didn’t include them as co-authors; they were acknowledged.”

“Living on BCI [Barro Colorado Island] was a bit like summer camp, wooden dormitories with screened windows, shared bathrooms and no privacy. Most of us stayed on the island for months to years at a time, with occasional trips to town to get personal supplies. There were only about 10 people, so we got to know each other very well – like it or not. My first year on the island was one of the most wonderful, and the second year one of the worst. There were no phones and the personal computer hadn’t been invented, so it was quite isolating. I would get up every morning, head out in the woods by myself until the parrots started calling and heading to their roosting sites (about an hour before dark), which would be my alarm to start heading back too. I had thousands of plants marked in light gaps, hot, messy, ant-y places to work. I would spend all day measuring leaves with a plastic grid to quantify herbivory. Excruciatingly boring – but there were always the myriad of interactions of the rainforest that more than compensated. Once I fell in a hole and it took me hours to climb out – no one would ever have found me. Dinners were communal, overcooked and rather boring. 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. Then up again with the dawn chorus of howler monkeys.”

“Lynda Delph did all the figures for that paper. Besides being trained as a scientist, she had been trained in graphic design and illustration. She did the figures by hand with a simple Leroy set, and they are beautiful to my eye. I have the originals on the wall in my office.”

“Making figures was a pain! I tried two techniques – sticking black letters and lines to the paper, and using a stencil to draw/print with ink. Decidedly hand-made.”

“Maybe a way to ask that question is, what would be a better paper to recommend than this one, if you had to read one paper in this field? And I’m not sure what that would be. And this is embarrassing because I do teach undergraduates and so I should be able to say, here’s what you should read if you want to get introduced to this field.”

“Mick Crawley taught me stats. He taught me a program called GLIM, which was used widely by ecologists before R became popular – and his book on GLIM for ecologists was the precursor of his popular text on R.”

“Mike and I partitioned the Fen into two halves. He had one territory, and I had another territory. When you map out a field site, you almost feel you’ve taken possession of your patch. And you become quite protective of your nests. I remember one of the wardens once telling me that an old man had been reported looking for nests along my stretches. I had a sleepless night thinking somebody might be collecting eggs on my study site. Then I woke up the next morning and realized that the old man, obviously, was me! Our daily routine was to look for new nests and to check the nests we’d already found to monitor their progress. It was the thrill of the hunt as much as anything and tremendous fun to see what happened to the model eggs in our experiments.”

“Mike Brooke is the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. He did the field experiments on cuckoos and reed warblers with Nick Davies in the 1980s that have now become classic papers in the field of co-evolution, setting the benchmark for quality in this research area and laying the foundations for all the cuckoo work done since. Mike helped out by finding nests and letting me sit in his freezing cold kitchen to measure nestling begging behaviour (The chicks were fine because we kept them in heated nests but I had to keep popping outside to warm up!). He also collected some of the provisioning data we used in our analyses during his time working with Nick in the 1980s.”

“Miss D.S. Paterson, Miss G. Robinson and Miss S. Carter [] were all secretaries, i.e. typists. For preparation and alterations of manuscripts, in those pre-computer days, the goodwill of departmental secretaries was essential!”

“Monte [Lloyd] was on my thesis committee and was incredibly helpful and inspiring to me as a naive graduate student (I didn’t realize at the time how unusual it was for Monte to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia to attend my committee meetings and exams).”

“Most of my ideas come from just birdwatching. Wicken Fen, just a short cycle ride from Cambridge, has a good population of common cuckoos, which parasitize reed warblers. Ever since I was an undergraduate here, I have been astonished by the sight of a little reed warbler feeding an enormous cuckoo chick; why are they fooled by a chick that’s seven times their own body mass? Steve Rothstein’s papers on cowbirds in North America had shown how one could do experimental work on host defences using model eggs. And it occurred to me we could do exactly the same to try and work out whether reed warblers have defenses simply by playing the part of the cuckoo ourselves and parasitizing nests with model eggs. So, it was this mixture of bird watching and reading Steve Rothstein’s studies which inspired me. There was also a wonderful paper by Richard Dawkins and John Krebs on arms races in nature pointing out that a lot of biodiversity evolves in response to interspecific interactions. That also bubbled around at the back of my mind as a theoretical boost to this study. But it was pure natural history interest which really drove the choice of the reed warbler and the cuckoo. We just thought it’d be fun to go around Wicken Fen pretending to be cuckoos!”

“Most of the software in Table 3 of the paper is obsolete in 2018. It has been replaced by functions in R and Matlab. Only Canoco is still around; this is the mother of all modern ordination packages, the one to which developers of new software compare the results of their code to make sure it works correctly.”

“Most were drawn by hand, and they show it. In 1976, the software options were limited.”

“My decision to work with skinks rather than snakes (the animals I had studied previously) was a strategic one. I wanted an academic job, so I needed papers in good journals, within a three-year timeframe – and I reckoned that I could do that more easily with abundant small skinks rather than rare large venomous snakes!”

“My dissertation written in 1976 was the first one that was produced with a word processor in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina (I still have some of the boxes of 80-character punch cards on which it was typed). During my PhD research, the first hand-held calculators became available, and one summer I was able to borrow one; it cost about $300 (my monthly salary at the time), and did only basic arithmetic. I’d have something more powerful now! Perhaps one advantage of that earlier work is that all the data were hand-written, and I still have the notebooks with those data from my dissertation, which I hope will facilitate someone repeating some of that work in the future.”

“My memory is that it was done mostly over email. Gosh, at this stage, it might have even been by mail. I don’t even know if you could send an attachment back in those days.”

“My views have shifted a bit. I think what that paper did get right is mating preferences can evolve for non-adaptive reasons. It is mentioned in that paper that almost certainly any gene that affects a mating preference is going to have pleiotropic effects, perhaps on things not having to do with mating at all. Every mutation, every allele that has a phenotypic effect has pleiotropic effects. It’s almost inevitable that those pleiotropic effects can have some influence on how the mating preference evolves. So I do think that there are a lot of “mating preferences” - female biases – that are responsible for the evolution of extremely elaborate male traits, that are there for reasons completely disconnected with mating. That much I think is correct. In this paper, and in some later papers, I was probably a little bit too militant about arguing against the so-called ‘good genes’ or indirect benefits. Much after this paper, I worked on the reinforcement of mating preferences, when you have two species that are hybridizing and producing low-fitness offspring. This is an idea that goes back to Dobzhansky. When you have that situation, you can have reinforcement of mating preferences that strengthen barriers and decrease the amount of hybridization. [...] And if you believe that reinforcement works, then you believe in indirect benefits, because reinforcement of mating preferences during hybridization is basically an extreme version of ‘good genes’. If you think about mating with a heterospecific as being a really bad genetic choice, that’s just an exaggerated version of picking a really bad male of your own species. So, it’s really a matter of degree. I’m more open, I think, now to the possibility of genetic benefits, not just with reinforcement of hybridization between species, but with conspecifics as well. So, yeah, maybe I’m getting old and soft, but I’m more open to that being a viable hypothesis than I was.”