“Papers are always an updates on the current thinking, the way things are at that moment in time, which is then expanded by future work. The really exciting thing about science is that it’s always moving; it’s always changing.”

“Particularly relevant was Thomas Lewinsohn, who was spending some time in our lab in Sevilla. He had been thinking in very similar terms and had a great understanding of these systems. His major contribution was to make us realize that the basic null model we were using to detect network patterns had a strong type I error [...]. This forced us to think carefully about the importance of null models and to develop a better one.”

“Partly because the jays that I got interested in for my dissertation were present across much of Mexico. And partly because I ended up falling in love with the country, and I made some very good friends in the country, who are my colleagues to this day, 30 years later, and ended up even marrying into a Mexican family. It’s kind of come to be a second home.”

“People were very friendly and we shared equipment across groups and even departments. For example, the algae I needed to feed the Daphnia was produced by a group in genetics department.”

“Perhaps I would emphasise the context in which it was written. People tend to forget history very easily. It’s important to understand history, to see the context in which science develops. In ecology there is this tendency: people start working in an area, there is a debate without resolution, and the area collapses. Twenty years later someone starts exactly the same thing and the cycle repeats. There’s little memory. For me, memory is important. I view this paper as one among others that are still useful today. So I would submit it among other papers to read in that field, but it doesn’t have a special status. For me, personally, it was an important paper, one of my favourites, but to my students it’s just one among other papers to read if they work in that area.”

“Piet Drent was working at the Westerheide and in Oosterhout. Since I was his PhD student, those areas became, naturally, [my] study area [...] too.”

“Plants are ideally suited to these high diversity Community Ecology questions because they don’t move and you can find them anytime you want!”

“Q: In the paper, you say that this particular 2.72 square kilometer area where you worked burned for seven days after a lightning strike on 17 June 1999. Did you decide to work in this particular 2.72 kilometer area after you discovered that it had burned? A: Yes. In 2000, we found that burnt site with tobacco plants in it, and, retrospectively, wrote in the paper about the history of that burn. It was important to make sure this site was in the first year after the burn. Tobacco plants can grow up to two years after an area has burned, but in the second year, other plants come in. In the first year, there are very few plant species other than wild tobacco. That’s why this information was important, that it was the first year after the burn.”

“Ray was in Seattle, and Al was in Irvine. Skype and email hadn’t yet evolved, and so we communicated largely by mail and occasional visits.”

“Read it and then the highly cited papers that cite it. Also let it help you understand about the importance of sharing data. I always published my raw data, from my D.Phil. and subsequently. Over the years, improved analyses will follow and science will progress.”

“Reading a paper from the past and not reading the follow-up literature won’t give you a complete picture of the phenomenon. Subsequent studies have provided quite a bit more shape and nuance to our understanding of this behaviour and how it varies across species. That being said, the flip side is also true, that it’s important to read the foundational papers from a field to understand where the field came from and how it developed. I also think it’s important to recognize that this was a very simple experiment, and sometimes a simple study is what is needed.”

“Remember, in those days the most important thing to get done was the thesis. Not writing papers for journals. Papers for journals were sort of an extra. The thesis was the hard thing. Once you got that done, some of us then wrote a lot of papers about the content of the thesis, but many other people never did at all, so all they have is a thesis somewhere in a library. This business today of publishing papers as chapters of your thesis, at the time or even before you get your degree, was not done in the 60s. In fact, there were even arguments that if you published a chapter it could not be included in your thesis.”

“Rob had been developing his EstimateS software, and I was in the early phases of developing the original EcoSim with Gary Entsminger. At that time, those programmes were fairly novel. There wasn’t as much software available then as there is today. This was well before the days of R and the open-source revolution, so there certainly weren’t that many pieces of free software available. We were excited about that aspect of it as well – to have these computing tools that we could introduce at the same time when we talked about the theory.”

“Sam Elworthy at Princeton University Press was responsible for the final title. He’s the one who stuck “Unified” in it, and I said “Why are you putting that in, it will just make everybody mad.” And he said, “Well, what you’ve done is unify the theories of biogeography and relative species abundance. That’s an important theoretical unification and if you don’t mention it in the title, well, you’re kind of… putting your light under a blanket. You should say what it is. It’s much more accurate than your original title.” So the editor at the press had a big hand in choosing the title.”

“Shortly after I moved to the University of Chicago [...] in 1974, Jonathan (now Joan) Roughgarden came through to give a seminar and I showed him around my lab. I was in the early planning stage of comparing feeding scores in newborn garter snakes and estimating heritabilities in two populations. Jonathan remarked that the heritability idea was the most interesting to him and that advice helped steer me in that direction.”

“Since the 2000s, there has been a kind of a renaissance in the literature on how to estimate and measure species diversity, and there are still lots of new and interesting papers coming out on that topic. I guess I would say to people who are reading our Ecology Letters review for the first time – recognize and pay attention to this whole new literature that came after this paper!”

“Since the time of publication, we have only seen even stronger evidence that species diversity reduces invasion success in manipulative experiments, while at the same time, does not causally drive the positive associations between native diversity and invasion often seen in observational studies.”

“So much has happened with the development of Multilevel Selection Theory that my 1975 paper is NOT the way to start! A student should begin with my most recent book, Does Altruism Exist?, and proceed from there, reading my 1975 paper for a sense of history.”

“So much has happened with the development of Multilevel Selection Theory that my 1975 paper is NOT the way to start! A student should begin with my most recent book, Does Altruism Exist?, and proceed from there, reading my 1975 paper for a sense of history.”

“Some of the graphics were roughed out on a graphics terminal, but a lot of the artwork was done by hand, by me, either using press type or other ancient technologies, like a pen and India ink. That is probably why one of the species names is spelled incorrectly. Things have gotten much better since then, except for my spelling.”