Last week SORTEE turned five. Along with COSSEE members, I attended Tim Parker’s SORTEE birthday interview here in Edmonton, Canada, with some SORTEE members joining online from around the world. Afterwards, we had a potluck.

People would celebrate what the society has achieved over the last five years. But that is not what I have been thinking about. I keep coming back to one afternoon in 2014.

At the time, I was a lecturer at the University of Otago. Tim (from the USA) had come to Dunedin, New Zealand, on an administrative visit. It was the first time we met.

My first PhD student, Ed Santos, now the manager of COSSEE, had established a study of dunnocks in the Dunedin Botanic Garden. It was a replication of Nick Davies’ classic work in the Cambridge Botanic Garden, UK. The same species, the same questions, on the other side of the world.

I took Tim to the garden to show him our study site, dunnocks, and talk about Ed’s project. Somewhere during that visit, we started talking about Type I error.

I cannot remember what we discussed in detail. But I do know that, if we had not had that conversation, I am not sure SORTEE would exist. I am not sure COSSEE would exist either. Neither of us had planned any of it. Tim was simply visiting Dunedin for something else, and I happened to take him to see some dunnocks.

In Japan we have a phrase, ichigo ichie. It comes from the tea ceremony and means, roughly, “one time, one meeting.” Every encounter happens only once. The strange thing is that you almost never know, at the time, which encounters will matter. I certainly did not that afternoon.

When people ask me about Tim’s biggest contribution, I think it is this. He has brought people together. The science, the collaborations, and even organisations such as SORTEE grew from those meetings.

EcoEvoRxiv reminds me of this too. I was fortunate to help lead its creation with many wonderful colleagues. It now hosts more than 3,000 preprints and receives around 50,000 downloads each month. But it almost closed down in its second year, and it survived only because other people stepped in when they did not have to.

Looking back, that has been the story of much of my career. The biggest changes did not come from careful planning. They came from conversations, chance meetings, and the generosity of other people.

So when I think about five years of SORTEE, I do not first think about the papers, the annual conferences, or the milestones. I think about one conversation in the Botanic Garden in Dunedin. At the time, it felt completely ordinary. Looking back, it changed the course of my career.

Celebrating five years of SORTEE. Tap any photo to enlarge.

Thank you, Tim.

And happy birthday, SORTEE.