Any idiot can do biology

Asked in a documentary why he went into his field, John Maynard Smith, the British evolutionary biologist who invented evolutionary game theory, laughed and answered that he had started out interested in physics but wasn't smart enough for it, and that any idiot can do biology.

The line does two things at once. He avoids the crude boast that he was smarter than other biologists. Calling himself an idiot also tells everyone his status is beyond doubt, since only someone with nothing to prove could get away with it.

It lands a second time on anyone who finds biology hard. If he is the kind of idiot who can do biology, a listener who struggles with it ranks below him, and lower than if he had claimed to be brilliant outright.

Wit, charm, tact, and social skill often work this way. The message comes from several layers of thinking about what the other person thinks about what you think about what they think, a chess game played in the brains of two people.