As I mentioned earlier, I started off my academic training in the field of ecology, moved sideways into ecological genetics for my Ph.D. and the following few years, and then moved sideways again into evodevo. In Chapter 3, I discussed an accident that played a major role in initiating the latter sideways shift. In the best tradition of Star Wars, here, later, is the rather less accidental story behind the former shift – ‘Episode 1’, if you like.

By the time I reached the final year of my B.Sc., I had developed a particular interest in evolution. I wanted to conduct my final-year research project in that area – but how? My tutors were mostly ecologists, so they weren't adept at finding dinosaur bones. But that didn't matter, as I was (and still am) primarily interested in the operation of evolutionary mechanisms rather than the reconstruction of evolutionary history. (I have become more interested in history – both evolutionary and scientific – with age, as tends to happen to people, but it is still not my main focus of attention.)

So the task at hand was to choose an evolutionary project that was ‘doable’, and a species on which to do it. In the end, I came up with a project that involved comparison of shell shape between two populations of a species of pondsnail that inhabited very different types of environment. At first sight, this seemed like a wonderful ‘adaptive scenario’; and this was in the days before that phrase took on a disreputable flavour and became associated with the derogatory expression ‘story telling’ – in the sense of plausible but not rigorously tested hypotheses.