Steve Jones is not your typical scientist. He collects cheese labels, snails, and death threats from disgruntled creationists. Here he tells James Meek about his latest project - an attempt to update Darwin

Guardian

There's a box of snail shells under the desk in Jones's small, scruffy, computer-crowded office at University College London, where he is professor of genetics. The gathering of useless facts has brought him richer trophies - his own BBC TV series in 1996 on genetics and evolution, even a £50,000 fee to appear in a Renault car ad, money that now funds his research. "I thought it was a rotten ad, but they seemed to like it," he says.

It's characteristic of Jones, 56, to be self-deprecating about his endeavours. His downbeat Scouse rap masks big ambitions in the crowded field of popular science writing, and a love for all those who assemble "useless facts" into powerful truths. The two passions come together in Almost Like a Whale, his attempt to update Charles Darwin's masterwork on evolution, the Origin of Species. "Yes, I think Darwin was a genius. He was an agglomerative genius, an assembler of facts rather than a discoverer of one big fact," says Jones. "He was a cheese-label collector extraordinaire."

Jones doesn't set out to compare himself with the great naturalist. In today's world, he argues, when even scientists in the same broad discipline can no longer understand each other, the proliferation of specialisation and the huge quantity of established facts in biology would make it difficult for a latter-day Darwin to arise.

He recalls a job interview at a university in which he made a joking remark about his intellectual powers. It didn't go down well. "I said: 'I have a fantastically broad knowledge of biology' - which is true - 'but it's unbelievably shallow', which is also true. Whereas Darwin had a broad knowledge of biology which was also pretty deep. I don't think anybody now could do what Darwin did, which was to go through everything and sort out the good from the irrelevant."

Jones makes the startling assertion that he has never met a biology undergraduate who has read the Origin of Species. He set out to write a straightforward textbook on evolutionary biology for those students, then realised that he could adapt the shape of the "greatest evolutionary biology textbook of them all". "It may be a rotten book, but it's a brilliant idea," he says. "It's like Birmingham town hall, which is the Parthenon. It was mocked when it was built because it was a copy of a Greek temple. But it's a beautiful building."

There's a drawer in Jones's office devoted to crank letters, abuse and even death threats from those who still believe that evolution is a bogus theory. The tide may have turned in scientists' favour in the battle between creationism and evolution, but one recent poll showed that 100m Americans believed that God created man some time in the past 10,000 years. "They're part of an unpleasant theme in American life, which is the triumph of ignorance," says Jones. "If you read so-called creation science it's so clear that they're lying to themselves that it's foolish to even argue with them. As I said to the American publishers, I don't mind if they burn the book, as long as they buy it first."

Jones lives in Camden, north London, with his partner, a TV producer, and has a second home in France. But he knows what it is like to be a struggling scientist, and is fierce on the subject of the underfunding of science in Britain. "However much you give a scientist, they will ask for more. Having said that, we're trying to hire brilliant people for less than they'd get driving a London bus."

Darwin had the luxury of an inherited income. When he died, he was worth about £17m in today's money. "I envy him being rich, although I do read the Guardian, naturally," says Jones. "You've got to bear in mind that the word 'scientist' hadn't been invented then. He called himself an intellectual gentleman, the same as most of the great Victorians, and there were very few of them."

Like other remarkable men of science and letters, Jones is able to hold apparently conflicting views simultaneously. He mourns the extinction of species after species as mankind extends its extraordinary reach across the planet's ecosystems. At the same time, he is fascinated by what is happening. Mass extinctions, after all, have happened before. "The difference is that in the past there wasn't anyone there to wring their hands over it," he says. "I naturally feel a deep sadness at what's happening to the world's diversity. Scientifically, of course, you have a great experiment."

Looking at humanity today as an evolutionary biologist, Jones says that we will not see evolution happen, but that our actions now have partly predictable evolutionary consequences. "The odd thing about human physical evolution is that if Cro-Magnon man was to get on the tube next to me in Camden Town today, I probably wouldn't notice. He might be dressed in furs and grunting but in Camden Town that's more or less the norm. The rate of evolution on average is astonishingly slow. Yet if you look at the present, evolution is happening with enormous power all around us. How we bolt those two paths together is by no means clear."

Jones asks if I have worn my glasses since childhood. I say I have. When humans were hunter-gatherers, he says, needing eyes to find prey and avoid predators, natural selection favoured good eyesight; over generations, you would expect the genes for short-sightedness to be bred out. "But now, as long as we have glasses, it doesn't matter. The genes of the future have been irrevocably damaged by the society of the present. But that doesn't matter as long as we have the social structures we do."

Jones argues convincingly that, with academic salaries as low as they are, only a lunatic or a fool would go in to science. But he is even more convincing when he talks of his love for science, and why someone would spend decades studying snails. "The beauty of science is that you find your own level," he says. "My level may be a grubber in the mud of the genetics vineyard, but the stuff I've done is solid science. It's there, it's written, it's published, it's done, and there are few professions where you can say that.

"You can make a much better living writing popular science books than you can being a scientist. But in the last few months I've started to do research again, and I'd forgotten how much more fun it is."