Temporal organization: reflections of a Darwinian clock-watcher.

This essay was prompted by the Editor’s invitation to illustrate the excitement and adventure inherent in scientific work while reflecting on my own preoccupation, as an evolutionary biologist, with biological clocks. In considering the challenge, the first adventure that came to mind occurred one evening 30 years ago when a drunken graduate student, frustrated by an unwanted experimental result, attempted to throw me out of a second story window in Princeton. He didn’t succeed. That seemed a good Indiana Jones start, but nothing as exciting occurred in later years, and all the adventures I can recount are less spectacular--the excitement of experiment and the hazardous fate of observation and ideas in the pursuit of understanding. While circadian periodicities have been the immediate object of my research for 40 years, that “view of life,” which Darwin so eloquently summarized in the last paragraph of “The Origin of Species,” has so dominated and guided my approach that it gets substantial attention in these reflections and hopefully ties together much of what I have to say about biological clocks. This Darwinian approach to behavioral and physiological interests traces to the accidental way I became a biologist. At 15 I kicked a soccer ball through a very large window in the Town Hall where I lived in the north of England. The only foreseeable source of the 13 shillings needed to replace it was a prize offered to local Boy Scouts for the best wild flower collection. In winning that prize, I got more money than was needed for the window and was seduced into a lasting love affair with plant