My first interest in public policy beyond US politics developed in 1950-1 when I was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, rooming with two World War II veterans and reading William Vogt's Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet. The discussions we had then about overpopulation and environmental deterioration had a profound impact on me. At the same time, so did reading books on evolution by Ernst Mayr (Systematics and the Origin of Species) and Theodosius Dobzhansky (Genetics and the Origin of Species) in connection with my desire to have a career studying the evolution of butterflies. The latter impacts were magnified by the increasing difficulty I was having raising butterflies from caterpillars at my New Jersey home, because overspraying with DDT for mosquito control was making plants in my neighborhood poisonous to insects.
When I went to graduate school in the Department of Entomology at the University of Kansas my first assistantship was working on the evolution of DDT resistance in fruit flies, and that deepened my concern over the toxification of the landscape and pre-adapted me to, a few years later, appreciate Rachel Carson's message in Silent Spring. At the time (mid-1950s) the restaurants of Lawrence, Kansas were segregated, and a faculty friend and I organized lunch time "sit-ins" of restaurants with mixed African-American and White groups. The restaurants wouldn't serve us, but they couldn't then serve others. Eventually, after death threats but no actual violence, the restaurants agreed to serve non-whites. This solidified my interest in social justice, which is a motivating force in my life even today.
When I was hired by Stanford in 1959, I was asked to teach a course in evolution. It was a 10-week course, and I spent the first 9 weeks saying where human beings had come from, and the last week saying where I thought we were going. The course was popular, and the students very much liked the last week of lectures. They told their parents about it,