David Winter is a doctoral student in evolutionary genetics in New Zealand. He blogs about the oddities of evolution and the things that make species distinct at The Atavism, www.theatavism.blogspot.com. You also can follow him on Twitter as @TheAtavism. Questions and answers have been edited.

Q: Much of your background is in molecular biology, yet your interests now are primarily in evolutionary processes. What prompted the change?

As part of my study, I was exposed to some of the ways these really cool new tools molecular biologists and geneticists were developing could be used to ask some of the biggest questions in biology. Allan Wilson is one my heroes. He was a New Zealander who was among the first people to use genetic information to understand humanity's place in the biological world. Wilson and his students established that humanity is united by ancestors we all share who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. When you live at a time when you can work on those sorts of ideas, I don't know why you do anything else.

Q: Many of your posts focus on insects. How did you become such an "invertebrate evangelist?"

Because people just don't know what they're missing out on. If you ask someone to name five animals off the top of their head, more often than not, you'll get five mammals. I love mammals, too, but there are 5,000 species of mammal and more than a million insects. If you only think about large furry things when you think about biology then you're failing to understand the true diversity of life on Earth.

Q: How has new technology in scientific research changed our understanding of how animals evolve?

You can see evolutionary genetics switching between periods in which we have lots of theories being developed but no ways to test them, followed by technological breakthroughs that give us loads of data but we need new theories to explain them. I suspect new DNA sequencing technologies - which are going to start giving us a lot of data about species we've never been able to understand at the genetic level - are going to send us into a data-heavy and theory-light period. It'll be exciting to see what new ideas come from that new data.