Successful ecologists are successful in part because they have prepared their minds to attack scientific problems using a variety of intellectual tools.

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.

There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments.

In addition to my comedic sensibilities, I also have a love of science. I think that it would be nice if, by the time we're doing the next version of 'Roger Rabbit,' it would be nice if I was receiving my Nobel prize the same week.

You get these moments of thrill. There you are, at 3:00 in the morning, and you know something about how we evolved that nobody else in the world knows. It's a thrill of discovery. You make this breakthrough, and you find something. It's this wonderful, wonderful scavenger hunt when you got to the end. It's just so great to be a scientist.

Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.

Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.