Bio.

As a teenager in a South Dakota hamlet (Pierpont, population 326 in the 1940 census) I had no idea that I would become a scientist. The only formal science course my tiny high school (40 students in four grades, taught by three teachers) offered was physics, taught by the sports coach (a history major) and featuring the ‘‘dissection’’ of a 1928 Overland (teacher: ‘‘I have been told that the modern automobile illustrates all principles of mechanics.’’). I was strongly influenced by my maternal grandfather, H. M. Solem, a Lutheran pastor and amateur naturalist who spent a summer as a youth in the late 19th century traveling with JohnM. Coulter, studying the botany of the Rocky Mountains. He took me on many botanizing walks through northeastern Iowa, where he lived, and when my grandparents moved to our South Dakota home when he was 88 our botanizing continued. I eagerly absorbed the Latin names he used when identifying plants. My grandfather was well-educated and, in retrospect, enlightened, and it was from him that I learned about evolution and first heard Darwin’s name. He often said that there could be no conflict between his religion and facts of science; if there were, we must have made some biblical misinterpretations. My main goal as a teenager was escaping Pierpont, and when my parents announced that we all were moving to the state of Washington so that I could finish in a proper high school and my two younger sibs and I could attend a Lutheran college and live at home, I was elated. I thought I might become a lawyer. Four of my uncles were lawyers and I was impressed with them and their success. So I declared a history major at Pacific Lutheran College and took a botany course to fulfill my science requirement. It took me only a few weeks (taking General Botany, with my then 93-year-old grandfather accompanying me on botanizing trips) to realize that I was destined to become a biologist. I was encouraged in this decision by my mother, Ina, a high school biology teacher (involved in testing and development of the Yellow Version of the ground-breaking Biological Sciences Curriculum Study high school books project). I enjoyed my college days, especially the science courses, including Vertebrate Embryology. I began research projects, and in my senior year a new professor (Jens Knudsen) joined the faculty, fresh from graduate school at USC. I was admitted to several graduate schools (including Berkeley and Cornell) but went to USC on the strength of Knudsen’s strong endorsement of Jay Savage as a potential major professor. I prospered under Savage’s guidance. I wanted to understand, at a deep level, how lineages diversify and I selected salamanders, in part because at that time there were about as many species as there were people in my home town and I knew I could easily remember that many names and a great deal about each one. I quickly came to understand how important neoteny, and paedomorphosis more generally, had been in salamander phylogenetic history, and that rapid and profound morphological evolution could be a result. I gained some insight into phenomena like homoplasy and stasis that became themes in my later career. I was especially interested in the developmental basis for the morphological traits (characters) that differentiated taxa. For me the greatest opportunities seemed to lie in the adaptive radiation of New World tropical salamanders. I was influenced by the writings of Julian Huxley, EVOLUTION & DEVELOPMENT 12:3, 244 –245 (2010)