A pearl diver in Japan.

An actor. I watched a lot of TV because we lived in the countryside and the weather was so bad.

An English teacher, and then a dance teacher.

A baseball pitcher.

Birds are still very much my hobby

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.

That is a difficult question to answer because I’ve worked in so many fields. I’ve worked in five different fields. Now which are the most important? In some ways, the development of the biological species concept, which I did not invent, but I certainly was the person that brought it to general knowledge. And the whole field of new systematics — I really am the one who developed it — was one of my major contributions. There’s another one, which is still not yet realized by almost anybody. I have done more, I believe, for the development of a philosophy of biology than any other person.

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.

And I still remember, and that's the honest truth, as we were leaving his office, he said, 'Well, I give you a fifty-fifty chance to come out alive'. That was Malaita at that time, and... and you can check in the books and will find that that was the... that's why nobody had ever collected there. Well, we made the first collection.

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.