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anticipate his line of interrogation, I quite often enjoyed and even looked forward to his Swift Hall classes, particularly after getting past medieval thought and on to that of the Renaissance and Francis Bacon's distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning. Even more appealing were the masterfully clear writings of the late-nineteenth-century Harvard logician C. S. Peirce. In the end, however, I was brought back to reality by my B on the final comprehensive. The message was clear that I should avoid further philosophical inquiry.
    By dropping the last quarter of math, I had time to audit lectures on physiological genetics by Sewall Wright, the university's best-known biologist. Besides being one of the world's most accomplished population geneticists and a leader in evolutionary thought, Wright also did much to advance biology toward understanding what genes do at the biochemical level. I had by then independently become focused on the gene through a reading that winter of Erwin Schrödinger's thin book What Is Life? Because Schrödinger, the inventor of quantum wave mechanics and a 1933 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had seen the importance of writing about biology, What Is Life? was featured in the Sunday book section of the Chicago Sun-Times. The next morning I checked it out of the biology library. Schrödinger elegantly laid out how genes were the most important feature of life, since they maintained its continuity by carrying hereditary information from one generation to the next. As birds had bound me to life sciences, Schrödinger's exaltation of the gene would lead me to a life of studying genetics.
    At the June 1946 commencement, Robert Hutchins elegantly warned of the doom of Western civilization unless university graduates led the world toward a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution that contrasted with today's postwar “get all you can” ethos. I was struck by our president's tone that morning—not that of the metaphysician but that of the preacher's son—as he fervidly admonished us that only by coming to see our fellows as the children of God would we stop seeing them as rivals. He further warned us that unless we esteem ourselves as more than animals we are doomed to act like them, and the laws of the jungle will prevail. Most unexpected were his statements that we can practice Aristotelian ethics only with the support and inspiration of religious faith, that the brotherhood of men must rest on the fatherhood of God, and that cats and dogs are more attractive than most humans.
    Excited by his forceful rhetoric but uneasy about its sentiments, my parents and my sister, who had just completed her first year at the college, walked across Woodlawn Avenue to the reception at Ida Noyes Hall. There Hutchins recognized Dad as we passed through the receiving line, and briefly chatted with him about their student days at Oberlin. Afterward Dad recounted how Bob had then been a rebel and had been part of a group that secretly smoked cigarettes.

    My advanced ornithology class at the University of Michigan Biological Station, summer 0/1946. I am in the back row, second from the left.
    At the start of summer I was on the train to Pellston, just below the Straits of Mackinac. Nearby on Douglas Lake was the University of Michigan Biological Station. Upon my arrival I registered for two courses, Systematic Botany and Advanced Ornithology, moved into a tented cabin, and soon found myself socializing mainly with those, like me, who were serving meals in the dining hall to make our limited means go farther. Now more than six feet tall, I no longer looked a physical misfit. For the first time I began to befriend peers who were not obvious oddballs, elected because no one else seemed keen to eat with me. Soon I was being called “Jimbo,” a southernism quickly adopted by several young waitresses who were inspired by my youth to treat me as a kid brother.
    Upon my return to fall classes, my seemingly