Many years ago myself and some colleagues thought we might write an evolution text. And I had the bright idea as to how to write it — it was to take Origin and say, okay, this is what the story is; why don't we just use the same logic and put modern facts in. As soon as we started it became obvious that this was not going to be a book but a library; it would be the same size as Biology, it would be enormous, everything from Aristotle to Zoos. So it sat in the back of my mind for 20 years, and then I started doing it on a much smaller scale. The big problem was to know what to miss out. However, it amazed me how well the structure of the original Origin holds up. It has a narrative flow and a structure, and all the discoveries of today bolt onto it extraordinarily well.

JB: Where do you see the biological sciences going in the near term?

JONES: The immediate future is one of introspection. There's already the flapping of wings as the molecular chickens come home to roost. Five years ago the optimists were saying that we will soon cure genetic disease. They've been remarkably silent the last 12 months, and they're going to be a lot more silent two years from now. The great unachievable, the human genome sequence, isn't actually answering many questions. Instead, it's asking them. And the hope of an immediate pay-off is also too optimistic. The heart was dissected in 1540, the circulation of the blood was in 1670 or so, William Harvey; but the first heart transplant was in 1966. I'm not going to say it's going to take 400 years between the human genome sequence and the medical application of genetics, but it's going to take an awful lot longer than anybody had hoped. And I do feel that what biology needs to do now is to sit down and think.

JB: What's next in terms of your own scientific research?

JONES: To get back to being one of the great narrow minds of the century. One of the things on which Gould and I are in perfect harmony is that we are each among the six top experts in the world on the genetics of snails; and the other four agree. I have plans to go back to studying the population genetics of lan d ed snails in the Pyrenees; which is a lot more fun than writing books.