Each of us has a story to tell, life experiences woven into a fabric we call "the web of life." My story starts in the wilds of the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania where my ancestors landed after escaping the tyrannies of Europe. Nature was all around us. We knew where the staff of life (food) originated: from the earth! There was no question of origins here. Food was not created; it arose spontaneously from the ground. The only outside force needed was solar energy, pure and simple.

Just outside the door on every hand we found food, ripe for the plucking. This food contained not only carbohydrates for energy, but proteins for amino acids, essential vitamins and minerals, and who knows what else. We didn't know all this; we simply matched our biochemistries, physiologies, and psychologies (our tastes) with what was available. Soon therefore we associated food with localities and seasons. We shared the chokecherries with the cedar waxwings and the huckleberries with the ruffed grouse.

As a boy I raised canaries, in which both male and female birds are a brilliant yellow. Starting with one pair, donated by an aunt, I ended up with 67 birds, in a sun porch adjacent to my bedroom. The birds were given free rein there, and they developed strong powers of flight. In my family of origin, we were not merely bird watchers, we lived with the birds. They were free to fly into the bedroom and back into the sun porch voluntarily. All of us -- parents and children -- became intimately involved with the canaries and came to understand their nuances of behavior and mentality.

We needed no alarm clock, only the birds. I traded one good singer for an antique Victrola on which especially good canary songs were played for the canaries to imitate. Other records were played for our own entertainment. Some of the birds picked up bars of "It’s Raining Sunbeams," sung by a young girl, Deanna Durbin. We also raised, in the canary room, a family of deer mice we had found in an old apple tree. They ate the same bird seed as the canaries. They also trilled the song of the canaries.

One day all 67 birds escaped through an open window. They perched atop trees throughout the community, singing. Our uncle, who had lost one eye in an accident, was asked if he had seen any of the birds. He pointed to a crow. This was my first lesson in the cooperation of both eyes in size/distance perception. Toward evening all the birds homed back into the sun porch, entering the window through which they had left.

We were assigned chores. I raised the chickens. Except in winter they were free-ranging. Some of them were "banties" (Seybright bantams), not far removed from their red jungle-fowl ancestors. I became intensely interested in their behavior. Noting that they appeared to be more energetic and stronger when they had to hunt for what they got, I would hide their food in various scattered areas and watch them search for it and scratch it up. We started the newly hatched chicks ("peepies") up in the attic -- our former bedroom. We not only woke up with the chickens, we grew up with them.

As the chicks matured, we placed them in the chicken house from which they could exit or enter at will through a little door. As the cocks matured, some of them fought, kicking each other, sometimes knocking out feathers. Certain cocks appeared to defend the places where I customarily hid food for them.

One vigorous cock, with especially ornate plumage and bright red comb, seemed very defensive of a spot where I often hid food under the decomposing leaves. Occasionally, this cock, upon discovering food, would pick at it while uttering soft clucking noises. Hens would come running and begin feeding there. The cock might then lower his wing toward a certain female as she crouched, and mating would ensue.

Early in the morning the cock would perch on his roosting tree, and announce his "cock-a-doodle-doo." Our aunt’s rooster, about a quarter-mile away, would answer. The chickens, especially the roosters, appeared to be highly space-conscious. They would repeatedly return to the location where the food was normally hidden. The roosters in particular seemed likely to engage in cock fights in the vicinity of such sites.

We discovered that a chicken could be "hypnotized" by holding it gently, then getting its attention fixed on a stick. If the stick were slowly withdrawn, the chicken would remain motionless when carefully placed on its side on the ground. Later, I found that blue jays, captured in a trap for banding, would stay still when gently held and turned on their backs. They would also remain motionless when released upside down on the ground or on top of a post. Captured dragonflies behave similarly when they are slowly lowered to the ground.

Having constructed a telescope, I early became fascinated with the beauty of wild birds, especially the brilliant-scarlet male tanager with contrasting black wings, which we called the "tit bird" because of his alarm note. He was strikingly visible in spring, as he sang in the open. His demure green mate, on the other hand, could hardly be seen, as she blended in with the foliage. The nest was discovered as she was building it, on a horizontal limb of an oak tree. The bottom was so thin that the eggs were visible from below. No rainstorm would flood that nest.

What accounts for the striking difference in plumage between the sexes of the scarlet tanager? The obscure green color of the female, matching the foliage, made sense, but the scarlet male looked like a Christmas-tree ornament, surely not designed for concealment. Actually, this is an apt description. The ornaments hung on Christmas trees often represent highly ornamental foods. The male golden bowerbird erects a "tree" over which he strews green-gray beard lichens (fungi with green algae in them). Later, he decorates the structure with colorful, eye-catching flowers and seeds.

Not only was the male scarlet tanager himself imprinted on my memory, but also the perplexing problem of the significance of the color differences between the sexes. Our devout mother, an ardent nature observer, explained that the highly ornamented male birds merely show that God loves beauty. It did not appear to bother her that God liked beauty particularly in males.

As with the plumage contrasts in the scarlet tanager, those of the goldfinch were equally intriguing. In this species both sexes are a cryptic, greenish color in the winter, but in spring the male dons a bright-yellow plumage, with contrasting black wings, while the female maintains her obscure, greenish color. Possibly the plumage change has something to do with the breeding activities. Much later, I discovered that the male rose-breasted grosbeak sometimes breeds before attaining the mature plumage.

In high school the class got into the study of the binomial theorem. At the time, little did we realize that it was this simple theorem -- dealing with chance combinations of occurrences involving two alternatives -- that led to discovery of the Normal Curve and the Laws of Heredity. In physics I admired the precision with which the principles of triangulation could be used to calculate the end result of forces operating in different directions at the same time.

But it was the chemists who seemed to get the biggest bang out of their efforts. The chemistry professor held up a yellow pencil and said, "There is enough energy in this pencil to blow up all of Ferndale." This was in 1934, more than a decade before Hiroshima. The use of a pencil as an illustrative symbol was most appropriate. Margarita Ryutova-Kemoklidze (1995), who reviewed the history of the development of quantum theory, stated, "Theoreticians have no trouble obtaining such energies; all they need is a pencil and paper." Modern quantum physicists realize that unification of gravitational and nuclear-attractive forces into a single mathematical description would require such enormous amounts of energy as would be experienced only in the early stages of the original Big Bang.

At Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana, where my kin went to college, I met S.W. Witmer (1890-1990) who, though having a Ph.D. in botany from Indiana University, was fascinated also with birds. He was amusingly methodical. Witmer's dictum was: "Describe what you see and add no effects." This, of course, was not to denigrate the important role of imagination and deduction in the sciences. It was simply to admonish students, usually in a hurry, not to report deductive conclusions as observations.

Witmer had learned this lesson (somewhat negatively) at Indiana University from his mentor there. In his cytological studies of plant tissues, he was sure he had observed the pairing of chromosomes during formation of gametes. His excitement abated when he was told not to be carried away by the new-fangled chromosome theory. (This was before the principles of cytogenetics had been developed.) I spent many hours with Witmer, banding birds and individually marking cardinals and blue jays for study of their territorial behavior. In due course I entered Indiana University as a graduate student in zoology.

The minute I stepped onto the IU campus I knew this was a good place for nature study, not only because of the relatively natural campus, but because of the intellectual traditions relative to nature studies. I thought it would be interesting to investigate the birds that frequent the campus and environs. While exploring that natural environment, I met an upper-level student, James Watson (1928- ), who had studied birds in the Chicago environs. But by the time I met him his main thoughts were not about birds, though he showed admiration for the work Margaret Nice had done on territorialism among song sparrows. Watson's thoughts were more on genes, especially the "naked" variety, as in virus particles.

At that time Indiana University was taking leave of its emphasis on field studies and was pushing ahead in laboratory studies, particularly in the area of genetics. In the zoology department at IU, Hermann Muller (1890-1967) was studying gene mutations in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Muller had much to do with the development of modern genetics from its beginnings in the "fly room" at Columbia University. In 1927, at the University of Texas, he discovered that irradiation destabilizes genes and therefore leads to their mutation. This caught the immediate attention of atomic physicists, including Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961). Since radiant energy destabilizes atoms and molecules, Muller's discovery led to the view that the gene might be a molecule.

The physicist Max Delbrük (1906-81), having found a home at Vanderbilt University after fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany, presented a theoretical model of the gene. Schrödinger popularized this model at Trinity College in England in a 1943 lecture series. The lectures were published in 1944 as the classic, What Is Life?

Delbrük was fascinated by the work of the "fly people," including T.H. Morgan and his colleagues from Columbia University, who had settled at the California Institute of Technology in 1928. Delbrük, who collaborated there, was naturally interested in fly chromosomes but, along with Morgan himself, realized that to determine the fundamental nature of the ultimate particle of life, the gene, something smaller than fly chromosomes must be found. (Incidentally, the pairing of chromosomes, gene by gene, a type of sexual selection at the microscopic level, has gone largely unnoticed by biophysicists. In the salivary chromosomes, this pairing is seen as a permanent, large-screen representation of what occurs in the reproductive cycle of the flies.)

To see tiny examples of the gene at its most fundamental level, the bacteriologists and virologists entered the picture. Salvador Luria (1912-91), who had escaped the fascist regime in Italy by fleeing to America, turned his early interest in physics to biology after meeting Delbrük in 1940 at a science conference. Luria had long been interested in collaborating with Delbrük in his studies of the structure of the gene. What materials could be simpler to work with than viruses? Luria established a virus group at IU. The students were excited by the way viruses that were killed with irradiation could be brought back to life by other forms of radiation. Watson, who avidly read What Is Life?, worked with Luria in performing experiments on the effects of radiation on viruses.

The DNA molecule was under attack on three fronts: physics, biology, and chemistry. By Watson's time the chemistry of the nucleic acids had been thoroughly worked out. Furthermore, among different samples of DNA it was known that there were pairing relationship among the ring bases of these nucleic acids. It was also known that chromosomes have both a protein and DNA component. What was not known, however, was whether it was the protein or the DNA that is the genetic material. Fortunately, this problem could be solved by studies of virus particles, which are still genetically active after the DNA has lost its protein coat. The coat is left outside the cell as the viral DNA takes over the metabolism of the cell and uses the cellular ingredients to make more of the viral DNA. The viral DNA is left free of protein and ready for analysis. All the pieces of the DNA jigsaw puzzle are waiting to be assembled to reveal the picture of life as we know it.

Watson dreamed about these "naked" genes -- and about ways to put the pieces of DNA into physically, chemically, and biologically sound relationships. Being a biologist, he was sure that the parts had a double-pairing nature, for the gene is a biological thing, and "Everything biological comes in pairs." All that remained was to unscrew the double helix. A helix of triple-paired ring bases was being proposed by Linus Pauling (1901-94).

Muller, in his class on mutation and the gene, would go through the most remarkable contortions trying to figure out how a three-dimensional object, such as a gene, could replicate. Muller's diagrams were bigger than he was as he stood beside them. Sometimes when he was so engaged the wind would blow his yellow lecture notes across the floor. The students would watch in bemusement as he bounced around gathering them up. Muller had little trouble keeping the attention of his students. He had a special step-up platform behind the lecture table so he could see out better. The students were occasionally startled and, of course, stimulated when he suddenly popped up to lecture.

In Muller's presentation itself it was obvious there was a huge gap in knowledge about the structure and function of the gene. Watson, during a walk on campus, complained that everyone was talking about the gene, but nobody knew anything about it. Reflecting that folks back home in Chicago expected great things of him, Watson decided to determine the structure of the gene. He seemed elated when I told him his work was of universal importance. On getting back to the lab he announced this to a certain gifted graduate student who happened to be the object of his attention at the time. She obviously was not impressed. In fact, she was infuriated. Watson had repeatedly reported to her how quickly he could do his experiments with viruses, one experiment per night. She, on the other hand, needed months to do an experiment involving the effects of testosterone on the development of combs in chickens.

As it turned out, this was not the only lady Watson was to infuriate. His abrasive dealings with crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who had confidentially shown him her X-ray pictures of the DNA molecule, are related by Anne Sayre in the book, Rosalind Franklin & DNA (1975). It was in these pictures that Watson first saw direct evidence that DNA was a double helix. Evidently, though, he and Franklin didn't see eye to eye on the significance of this evidence.

Watson's advisory committee was waiting for him. It was time for the oral part of the Preliminary Examinations. This inquisition aims, among other things, to show that a particular graduate student knows significantly less than the faculty. The whole process is not only to determine whether a potential graduate student is worth keeping around but also to knock off a few rough edges. Although I don't know how the committee members treated Watson, or even what he was asked, he related later at lunch that he couldn't eat, for his stomach was full of butterflies.

In his attempts to decipher the gene, Watson had a choice between a physical or a chemical approach. Ironically, in spite of the fact that he hated chemistry, which he thought was a lot of kitchen work, he bit the bullet and tried the chemical approach. For these studies he went to Europe where DNA was under investigation by seasoned chemists and physicists. After one year there, he decided on the physical approach.

Biologist Watson and biophysicist Francis Crick (1916- ) were the first to describe the double-helical structure of DNA, a discovery for which they would share a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962, along with biophysicist Maurice Wilkins (1916- ).

The double-helix breakthrough led to the rapid development of molecular biology. There is a lesson to be learned from this DNA story. Though the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, the whole cannot be comprehended without a proper understanding of the parts. The DNA story also shows the immense potential of "reductionism," which amounts to reducing the whole into its parts for study, making the problem as simple as possible. Putting the parts together to create the whole is known as "complementation." Since the parts are sometimes too tiny to be visible, a lot of deduction goes along with the process. Ideally, deductions should be supported by observation.

In the case of DNA, electron microscopy provided the observation. Not only was the double helix seen, but also the mechanism by which DNA makes proteins out of the constituent amino acids. Who would have thought that each cell contains little tape-recorder heads (ribosomes) through which recorded tapes pass? DNA strands serve as templates for stamping the three-lettered codes that instruct the ribosomes how to assemble the amino acids into proteins.

But DNA is not the whole story. There is much more to life than four letters of the alphabet, representing four ring bases: C (cytosine), A (adenine), T (thymine), and G (guanine). In fact, the entire gene complement of a cell is the mere clay of life awaiting the sculptors (natural and sexual selection) to shape it into living organisms. Genes do not operate in a vacuum. Their activity depends on the immediate "furniture" within the cell, as well as the environment outside. This is where field biology comes to the rescue.

In recent years Crick has been applying the reductionism used in deciphering the gene toward understanding the human soul. Why not? One good discovery deserves another. But this remarkably insightful investigator may ultimately discover that the soul encompasses all the experiences of life -- from head to toe, including even the entire outside world. Reductionist methods may need to be supplemented by field studies showing that the soul is more than the sum of its parts.

Watson, meanwhile, appears to be concentrating not on the whole human soul, but the whole human genome. The aim of the numerous investigators now probing the human genome is to read its entire genetic code. It remains to be seen whether either Watson or Crick, who raced as a team to describe the double helix, will reach their new goals. In any case, reaching goals is often a collaborative effort, requiring input from numerous investigators.

Analyzing nature and studying the parts is a relatively safe procedure. Many scientists therefore are satisfied with stopping here. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was one of these. Having analyzed the components of light and the motion of bodies, he rested securely in his clockwork view of the universe. He was known for his refusal to make abstract speculations. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was his exact counterpart. He was addicted to far-flung theories. In fact he died while attempting to find a unified theory to encompass all the forces of nature. In a sense, he was a physical ecologist.

Whereas analyzing the component parts of nature is a fairly simple procedure, synthesizing the parts to create the whole is inordinately complicated. It's all too easy to come up with false constructs. This is particularly true in the fields of evolution and animal psychology where it is difficult to check theories with direct observation. Extrapolations of laboratory results into the world of nature may be drastically off the mark. Herein lies the basis for the philosophical controversy between the mechanists (behaviorists) and the ethologists in interpretations of animal behavior. Can animal behavior all be interpreted in light of simple immediate responses to stimuli or does an overall view help direct their behavior by a type of consciousness? (This matter is explored in Chapters 6 and 7.)

At IU, Muller taught the evolution class -- from the point of view of genetics. He took his personal investigations not much farther than a study of gene mutations, under laboratory conditions. Although it has been reported that he was once lost in the wilds with an insect net, possibly trying to catch fruit flies, we never noticed that he had any interest in fieldwork at Indiana University. He thought nature studies were "old fashioned." Like Darwin in his later years, Muller was a denizen of his den where he could usually be found with his magnifying glass observing fruit flies in little bottles. In his evolution class, when asked why no new species are observed arising in nature, Muller claimed that all these generations of natural selection have led to "the best of all possible worlds." Muller likened the present state of species to precisely engineered watches. A watch would not get any better if dropped, causing a change, a mutation.

During a symposium, Muller once inadvertently demonstrated his perfect-watch mutation theory in a large lecture hall. He accidentally dropped his flashlight pointer. Upon resuming the lecture, he sheepishly remarked that the behavior of the pointer appeared somewhat erratic. This brought forth ripples of empathetic laughter from the audience.

According to Muller, when mutations arise among the perfect species, they may be expected to be harmful, as is indeed found to be the case with radiation-induced mutations. Since Muller by that time was a Nobel laureate, his students avidly entered his sayings into their notebooks, in preparation for the next examination. Even in science, where nature is supposed to be the authority, underlings have a tendency to give undue credit to overlings. But any student of animal behavior in the class would obviously see a need for field studies to determine whether the professor was right. Are existing species perfectly adapted to their niches?

At IU, students of general animal behavior were conspicuously absent. At that time, studies in any form of psychology were isolated into a separate department, which concentrated on human behavior. Even Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), who had been in the zoology department at IU as a professor doing research on the evolution of isolated populations of gall wasps, turned his back on the wasps when he noticed that studies of human sexuality were more interesting than wasp taxonomy. He developed his own institute and was sort of a misfit insofar as some of the IU constituents were concerned. Many of them wanted him to cease and desist in his investigations. But the administration insisted that it is the policy of the university to allow faculty members to study anything they choose.

Muller invited Kinsey, as well as Julian Huxley (1887-1975), to lecture to his evolution class. Julian was a grandson of Thomas Huxley (1825-95), one of Darwin's chief allies. Julian was author of the textbook, Evolution, the Modern Synthesis (1942). Having done studies in sexual selection, he had concluded that Darwin's theory of sexual selection was wrong. Darwin had said male creatures received their special adornment by a process of females choosing beautifully adorned males. Julian, however, supported the view that much, if not all, beautiful male adornment gave males an advantage in the natural battle for survival, independent of any female choice.

Early in his career Julian Huxley had worked on the genetics of freshwater shrimp (amphipods). In class Muller had stated that some amphipods living in caves were eyeless. He explained this on the basis that eyes were not needed in caves and, furthermore, were actually an impediment, since they got scratched when the animals bumped them against the walls of the cave. Eyeless mutants were therefore favored by natural selection. He gave no further particulars.

Muller explained the origin of blind cave fish in these same terms. But a former professor at IU, Carl Eigenmann (1863-1927), a famous student of fish, had maintained that cave fish lost their eyes simply by inheriting an acquired characteristic: Their eyes ceased to exist because they were of no use in the dark caves. Lack of use of the eyes led to their gradual atrophy, and the condition became hereditary.

After Fernandus Payne (1881-?) came to IU as a cytology teacher and researcher, he decided to put the theory of use and disuse of eyes to the test. For this he used the fast-breeding fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He cultured the fruit flies for 39 generations in the dark, in an artificial "cave" (a dark room under the steps in the biology building). Upon making meticulous observations of the eyes of the flies, Payne could see no difference between those of fruit flies grown in light and those grown in the dark. Having proved a negative, he went back to his main study, general cytology. Later, Muller said that if this study had been continued, the eyeless mutant in Drosophila melanogaster would eventually have arisen spontaneously. What conclusions would Payne have drawn then? Perhaps we'll never know.

Noting the need for field studies, I searched the local caves. I found no eyeless amphipods, but near the entrance of May's cave (a few miles from Bloomington) I found a community of sighted amphipods, which were furiously mating. There were light-bodied as well as dark-bodied forms in the community, and they were mating selectively. The dark ones were in pairs, and the light ones were in pairs. This appeared to be sexual selection in action!

I was excited when all the specimens -- light ones and dark ones -- sent to an amphipod expert were identified as one species, Gammarus minus. My enthusiasm waned, however, when I discovered that the dark forms differed from the light forms in the structure of the antennae. According to all taxonomic rules at the time, these must then be classified as different species. Sexual-selection studies are supposed to be done within a single species.

In the same vicinity 17-year cicadas were emerging. Though all these were supposed to be one species, Magicicada septendecim, I again became intrigued after noticing that large and small forms were segregated on the basis of habitat selection. Furthermore, large forms were sexually segregated from the small forms, and the two forms had different mating calls. After at first entertaining thoughts of studying sexual selection in this species, I later suspected that these two separated groups of cicadas are actually two different species. I reported this in the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Later, cicada taxonomists agreed that these are two different species.

Above the caves are "solution ponds." These are formed after the underlying limestone has been dissolved out by carbonated rainwater, and surface depressions are left on the ground above. Numerous dragonflies were breeding in these ponds. It was soon noted that males of a small, amber-winged dragonfly, Perithemis tenera, were perched along the margins of a pond at regular intervals. These males seemed to be attracting females to certain stations around the pond and mating with them. Since their behavior was highly localized and overt -- and specimens could be experimentally marked with small dots of paint for studies in sexual selection -- it was decided to focus on them.

But first, the game of Preliminary Examinations had to be played in front of the IU zoology legends. The results of this contest left my stomach full, not of butterflies, but dragonflies. The first pitch came from Fernandus Payne, who liked his answers lean, with no hemming and hawing. He threw a hard ball: "Is evolution a fact?" Like many similar queries, I thought that was a dumb question, but I didn't say so. (I consider such questions unanswerable, for they are utterly lacking in precision.) I said I accepted microevolution as a fact, but not macroevolution. I questioned whether the theory of natural selection of mutations was adequate to account for the origin of major categories of organisms. Base hit!

"Mr. Mutation and the Gene," H.J. Muller, was waiting for me in the third-base coaching area, smiling and twiddling his thumbs in his characteristic manner. He also had smiled like that when I was taking the written part of the qualifying exam in his office. I wasn't having that much fun trying to answer the question, "Why are newly arisen mutations usually recessive?" Since all the desks in his office were thoroughly cluttered, he had me sit with my feet stuck in the side of a big wooden box (in which he had received a huge model of a fruit fly he used for lecturing). The box was my desk, and it shook with each stroke of my pen. Not only did Muller have an office that could have qualified as a disaster area, he wasn't known for his mechanical dexterity. He had a lot of trouble running a stopwatch. During the examination a phone call came in, and he began looking for a number in the directory. When he paged down to the lady's lingerie section, he looked up grinning and said, "This seems to be a Sears catalog." Dr. Muller was a most astute observer!

Pitch #2 was a curve. Queried Payne: "Can you suggest a simpler explanation than the natural-selection-of-mutations theory for the origin of organisms?" Since Payne liked simple, direct answers, I gave one: "The inheritance of acquired characteristics." Another base hit! Muller, who had come close to losing his career, even his life, in Communist Russia for his association with, and promotion of, "Western" genetics -- with its ideas about heredity and failure to accept the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics -- smiled and twiddled his thumbs even more now.

The next toss from pitcher Payne was a drop. I saw it coming. "Can you give us an example of evolution," he asked, "which can be better explained in terms of the inheritance of acquired characteristics than on the basis of natural selection of mutations?" Yes! At the swing of the bat, I replied, "The external genital apparatus of the damselfly."

Each species of damselfly, I went on to explain, seems to have its own lock-and-key mechanism counteracting the possibility of hybridization. The female carries a lock on the anterior end of the top of the thorax. The male also has a lock -- at the bottom of the abdomen on the second and third anterior segments. The male has a key that matches these two locks. The key resides on the tip of his abdomen. Somehow he knows what to do with his key.

First, bending his long abdomen forward, he inserts it into his lock in a type of self-mating maneuver. This results in the passing of a spermatophore into his lock. Next, he flies to the pond and finds a good place for reproduction. He waits for a female, though not any female. He awaits his specific female. He catches her and inserts his species-identification key into the species-identification lock on the top of the female's thorax. Coupling results, as the male holds the female dangling from the tip of his abdomen.

The female also carries a key on the tip of her abdomen. This key matches the lock at the base of the male abdomen where the spermatophore is stored. She bends her abdomen forward and, after some effort, inserts her key on the tip of her abdomen into the lock at the bottom of the sternite of the male -- and, so engaged, obtains the loot, the spermatophore. Having performed this complicated coital conniption, the female is ready to lay her eggs.

The odd mating method is not without its advantages. The firm hold of the female by the male promotes monogamy by preventing her from being clasped by other males. In fact, extraneous males frequently attempt this clasping, unsuccessfully. The long abdomens of both male and female facilitate the underwater egg laying. The female sometimes goes several inches beneath the surface to lay her eggs in submerged vegetation, while the male maintains his hold on her thorax. If she goes too far under, the male releases her before his wings get wet. The male then flits about intently above the area where she went down and drives away intruding males.

After the female has finished egg laying and tries to emerge from the water, she often gets stuck in the surface film. Were she to be blown about over the pond, she might become a ready meal for fish. Fortunately for the poor damselfly in distress, her heroic mate quickly rescues her and lifts her from the water. They can then fly away together, looking for another egg-laying site.

Given the structural and mental complexity of this mating system, it is little wonder that few, if any, hybrid dragonflies are reported. The Odonata have a patent on this mating system. To understand its origin in terms of natural selection of rare mutations may explain why so many entomologists, geneticists, and the like are bald on the top of the head. Scratching of the head over such problems may have produced, after many generations of doctoral candidates, a hairless condition.

Are we to believe that, in past history, locks and keys arose promiscuously over the bodies of damselflies for eons of generations until the proper fits had been matched? This is to say nothing of the origin of the proper mental qualifications for use of the locks and keys. It also overlooks how the species reproduced before the system was operational.

If we start with end-to-end transfer of genetic material between the sexes, characteristic of the rest of the insects, what advantage would be gained by a male bending his abdomen forward and depositing a spermatophore on the front of his abdomen? If this were a wasted effort, would it not have been weeded out by natural selection -- instead of persisting for millennia while other parts of the system, similarly energy-wasting, had been perfected? This does not seem natural.

Payne's third question had been a good one. Can you think of a method for explaining evolution that is simpler than the natural-selection-of-mutations theory? The theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics bypasses the need to wait for trial and error on the road to perfection. It is thereby closer to obeying the natural law of energy conservation than is the mutation theory. Simply stated, the animal gets what it needs. It presupposes a desire, a drive. According to this theory, the wish is the father of the acquisition -- and, yes, necessity is the mother of invention. There is no wasted effort. The giraffe, obeying its innate desire to obtain food, a desire shared by all organisms, stretches its neck to reach the leaves high up in the trees. Since offspring resemble their parents, the young giraffes will inherit longer and longer necks until the topmost leaves are reached. After the highest leaves are reached, there is nothing left to desire. If we could throw into this system a method for transmitting the result to the offspring, we would, indeed, have a method simpler than the mutation method for executing evolution. (In fact, the theory of sexual selection incorporates an element of desire. According to Darwin, the female desires a beautiful mate and therefore eventually produces one.)

In the case of the human brain, in which desire for more and more knowledge, and all the competitive advantages that go with such power, may have no limit. Selection could lead to brains of celestial proportions. As an analogy, Timothy Ferris (1992) sees individual galaxies in the cosmos representing separate segments of a brain. Connecting these parts is a network of channels of electromagnetic communication, just as neuronic filamentous extensions permit communication among various parts of the animal brain. Ferris is a member of a group advocating the more extensive use of radio telescopes for interception of such cosmic messages.

The theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is beautifully simple -- and it satisfies the first part of the rule of Einstein, "Make everything as simple as possible." Einstein had made a career of applying this rule in physics, especially in the field of energy. But he was keenly aware of the danger of oversimplification -- hence the modification of the rule, "but no simpler."

Is the inheritance of acquired characteristics too simple? August Weismann (1834-1914) thought so. The mice from which he had cut off tails for 20 generations had not inherited short tails. He was convinced that hereditary particles are distinct from the rest of the body, insulated from all external influences. The stretching of the neck by the giraffe would not therefore influence the heredity of the offspring.

To apply the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics to the case of dragonfly reproduction might simplify the problem a little. At least the development of the reproductive system would be directed by a desire -- to reproduce. This direction would eliminate some of the randomness inherent in the natural-selection-of-mutations theory.

A still simpler theory would have been that the entire process had been intellectually conceived by a genetic engineer and put into effect by a single directive. Maybe nature could find a use for human-type intelligence after all. But by the same argument, humans -- even given the inorganic world as a starter -- would need to possess a type of omniscience to engineer the type of complex ecosystem we see today. It may require an outside cosmic view, a unified field theory encompassing life itself.

This same predicament is faced in the physical sciences. Einstein was unwilling to accept the view that the universe arose by chance, or by the fortuitous concurrence of atoms, as the ancient Greeks put it. Einstein persistently worked under the theory that the universe was put together by a Creator who, Einstein said, did not play with dice.

But paradoxically, in his graduate-school thesis, "On the Motion Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat of Particles in Fluids at Rest" (1905), Einstein proved that randomness can lead to direction. He proved statistically that the random impacts of molecules of water bombarding a suspended pollen grain could result in moving that grain a certain direction.

At any rate, in response to Payne's request for a simpler solution to the origin of life forms than a natural-selection-of-mutations explanation, Special Creation, with its inherent implications of conscious directives, would have been the simplest. But this answer would have shifted the entire problem into the department of theology. The trouble with that department is that the personnel there aren't known for testing their theories; they simply believe in them. Such methodology is anathema to the natural sciences. Had the ancient worshippers of Father Sun experimentally withheld their worship to discover whether the object of their devotion would really fail to rise in the east, the theory on which their religion was based would have collapsed, and the entire superstructure would have come crumbling to the earth from which it had sprung.

Three decades ago there was a push to move theology to the scientific stage of intellectual pursuit. One of the proponents, Bishop James Pike (1913-69), lost his life in the effort. His remains were found in the hot, dry, desert sands of the Mideast where he had gone in pursuit of higher theology. The natural science of desert climatology might have saved him.

This entire discourse, of course, was not included in my answer to Payne in the Preliminary Examinations; only a partial sketch was stated at the time. I wondered if I had hit a foul ball down the left-field line. My answer had been neither simple nor direct. But my hitting coach, "Mr. Field Biology," Frank Young, said if it were called a foul he would go to bat for me. The umpire, "Mr. Field Theory," Theodore Torrey (1907-86), called it fair -- a home run! I sailed past Mr. Mutation Theory at third base and jumped on home plate.

The prize, the Eigenmann Fellowship, for continuation of studies in sexual selection, was received, but not for study of blind fish. Instead, this project would involve an organism with exceptional visual acuity: the dragonfly. In fact, use of dragonflies -- insects in which vision is especially significant in the mating system -- would eliminate the persistent problem of smelling and tasting, an especially sticky wicket in studies of animal behavior.