I read The Origin of Species in high school, and it was, it
fascinated me to understand a mechanism by which life on Earth
could have evolved. And at the same time we were learning about
Mendel's Rules, and I liked the logic and kind of the underlying
mathematical structure of genetics.
I think the advice to figure out what you love, and then pursue
that interest. I don't know any particular person that told me
that, or maybe all of my mentors told me that. But I had this
very strong feeling that in order to succeed at what you do,
you have to not only be driven and talented at it, but you have
to love it. You have to be able to really immerse your mind and
immerse your creativity in that field. And that takes a certain
amount of fa- you have to be fascinated by it. So find what
you love and then pursue it.
I think we learn about biology in two different ways. And one
is experimentation, and that's what a lot of people will think
of science as, so that you have a hypothesis and you perform an
experiment. But there's a second way we learn about nature, and
that is by observing patterns in the world and trying to make
connections between those patterns. And so that was,
I would say I was probably more doing that sort of
natural history when I was a child. I would go to lakes and
sample all of the frogs at their various stages, and try and
figure out, you know, when do they develop their legs, and
when do they start crawling out of the lake and looking at
mosquito larvae and trying to figure out how they were
developing. And that's not experimentation. I'm not
manipulating. But at the time I was observing.
If I read something that puzzles me, I can start working on it
tomorrow. If something doesn't make sense to me, or a student
comes to me with a problem that I think is really exciting, we
can jump on it right away. And that ability to decide what's
important and pursue it immediately is a real pleasure.
You know, it's, there isn't one. There's like a dozen. So a
researcher has to be good at time management, good at
writing, good at talking, good at seeing projects through to
completion, creative, insightful, logical, a good
mentor, a good teacher, willing to take advice but also willing
to be doggedly single-minded when you think you know that you
have something right and other people have it wrong- you still
have to be dogged about it. There's just so many different
aspects of being a good scientist, that kind of have to
come together and get married together to succeed.
The main one is understanding how we came to be, and how the
organisms around us evolved, and the way that the past
3.5-billion years of evolution has taken us. So I feel like
that societal benefit is a really fundamental one. We want
to understand how the stars work, we want to understand how
the solar system works, we want to understand how gravity works,
and we also want to understand how biology works, how
organisms evolve. And so I think that's the most fundamental
benefit to society, is really improving our understanding of
the world and our place in that world.
I think that there's not one person that has had a huge
influence. But I feel like there are dozens of people that have
had a huge influence on my thinking. Evolution is such a
broad, multi-faceted topic that the insights come from I think
lots of people working together and pushing the field forward in
different directions. And so I feel that that combination of
all of my mentors and all of my colleagues working together
is the biggest influence on my thinking.
I think people have this view of evolution as, oh, evolution just
goes to whatever is optimal, whatever is best. And the
problem with that view is, well, there must be one best way to
make a living. And so if there was that one best way, wouldn't
all organisms evolve to that one best thing, and we'd have a
very boring world where everything was doing the very
same thing. And so clearly that's not true. And
that leads us to think, well, there must be different
solutions, different directions in which evolution heads
under different circumstances.
It's the people and what they carry in their brains that's the
most important thing, and I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't
worry one second about anything else that got lost.
I really, really like music, and I don't know anything about it.
So I just turn the radio on and I switch channels until I hear
something that I like, and I play it. I love working in
cafes. I do a lot of my writing and a lot of my math in cafes,
and I like just having the music surrounding me.