I love making jam. Plum is best.

I like reading, I like swimming.I go snorkeling if I can. But not because I’m stuck, but because I enjoy them. And when I am swimming or whatever, I find I have more time to think.

We work with young people, from the ages of 11 to 17. Our main program is the Pathways to Freedom. And we’ll be going from Memphis, Tennessee through ten other states, and Washington, DC, and to Canada. It began July 13th and ends August 8th. We hope to take as many young people and their chaperons as possible throughout these areas, and stop and have workshops and programs. They’ll be traveling in buses, and we hope that will inspire and give them a sense of history and also to encourage them to be concerned about their self and history and motivated to reach their highest potential.

I became interested in the United Way, because, in our contract with the television networks, we had a certain amount of promo time for ourselves. It was so much money, about $40 million a year. We had a couple of extra minutes on each tape, on each network. We used them for a while on relatively self-serving things, and I thought, rather than have that time be spent on saying “the NFL is great,” we should try to use it for some good. That’s when we bound our relationship with the United Way.

Well, this has changed in the course of my life. In my early career, my development of the so-called new systematics was the thing I was very proud of, and at the species level everybody followed my idea. The latest thing I’m most proud of that has not yet been fully appreciated by the philosophers is my development of the philosophy of biology.

Now look here, young man. If you become a medical doctor you will never have a chance to go to the tropics, you will be far too busy.

The interests of a person plays a considerable role. For instance, people who are born naturalists should choose different professions than people who have a spectacular mathematical talent. I think it depends on a person’s talent, what he should choose and what he should love. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re not going to do a good job.

Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.

Well, I’ve completely reneged on that one and within a very short time, I think within three or four years.…Well, it has now been shown that it occurs very commonly in fishes, particularly cichlid fishes. So here’s another thing where my intuition was wrong.

Unfortunately I have too many projects going. Two of them, fortunately, are already in the editors’ hands. One is this book on the birds of Northern Melanesia I’m doing with Jared Diamond, and that deals with speciation and particular ecology, biogeographic dispersal and all the other questions.