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It's things like Wikipedia that help us to advance as a society and help us to accelerate our evolution. If you're a researcher and you need some answer to something, and in today's world you can find it this quickly, it allows you to develop whatever you are doing much faster.

Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.

Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.

The idea is that we're doing it just for the joy of the actual physical experience. We may record something just for the fun of it, but the idea is just to be truly joyful and truly fun, especially for me, because I take myself too seriously all the time.

In science, each new result, sometimes quite surprising, heralds a step forward and allows one to discard some hypotheses, even though one or two of these might have been highly favored.

Everyone wants to pretend like they sprang out of the ground with an Animal Collective record in their hands and a David Bowie haircut, and that's just not the case. You discover these things gradually.

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.

Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.