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to follow the recipe and make goulash. So in relating genotype to phenotype we will get nowhere if we confine embryology to a black box. The contribution to development is the only way genes affect phenotype. We also need to understand how incremental changes in phenotype could result from small changes in development, which then result from changes in DNA. This severely limits natural selection: there is no way to start a new production line, all improvement has to come from changing the old production line! So after all reductionism plus massive data collection, we need to return to the assembly line in the embryo, if we ever hope to understand life. You present columns on Dutch TV and in a national newspaper; these are not limited to science, but concern politics, and in fact you seem to have become an opinion leader in your country. Do you see any link between being a scientist and a columnist, and how did you decide to become a columnist? There are some common features. You want to recognize patterns and developments, preferably before everybody else does. Also there is some playfulness: teasing the system. If you pull here, what happens there? Finally both professions are very much language based, and being a scientist one should know how to present a clear story in limited space. But of course this is just rationalizing. I never aspired to be a columnist, it grew out of a little thing I once did for a local university magazine. Things evolve, without design. There is one big difference between the two types of activity: visibility. I spend my full week in the lab and on Sunday afternoon do a two-minute live column on national television. Then people ask me: " Do you still find time to do your science? " TV can severely distort perspective! One issue of pressing concern as global threats to biodiversity increase is an understanding of how ecosystems showing exceptional species richness have evolved and are maintained. One traditional explanation has been that species have evolved to occupy highly specialised niches within such ecosystems. But several studies have suggested this may not be the whole answer. A team of researchers led by the Proceedings B of the Royal Society (published online) have been studying detailed datasets of 120 wrasse species living on the Great Barrier Reef. Coral reefs present one of the richest …