My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them.

Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that extent I'm a cautious optimist.

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

As an American I must say I haven't been very encouraged by the way in which the people who run the government in the United States have been listening to those contrary voices. And so long as the power to run the world lies in the hands of people who are quite happy to see it get warmer, or fuel be used more, then would those people who oppose it are crying in the wilderness - that's the real problem.

If I ask you who is the most famous scientist who ever lived, or the greatest scientist who ever lived you'll say either Einstein or Newton or something like that because their claims were supposed to apply universally. But the claim of somebody who is studying a particular feature of the evolutionary process like whether it's very fast or very slow, or occurs in steps and so on, that's not a universal claim, that's a rather specialised claim and so you can't claim to great fame and great success.

Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or theories that apply to the greatest ambit of things in the world. And if you've only made a very good theory about snails, or a very good theory about some planets but not about the universe as a whole, or about all the history of humankind, then you have in some sense accepted a lower position in the hierarchy of the fame of science as it's taught to you as a young student.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.