A historic picture. . .

. . . well, at least in my history. I found this picture by accident while trawling through my iPhotos. I don’t have a date (the info on the photo says 2022, but that can’t be right), and I don’t know who took the photo: it could have been me or it could be my friend Andrew Berry.

But it does show three generations of evolutionary geneticists, photographed in Dick’s office at Harvard after he retired. The top photo is of Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975), the Ph.D. advisor (at Columbia) of Dick Lewontin (1929-2021), my own Ph.D. advisor, the living person to the right. Dick was a huge fan of Dobzhansky, whom he called by his nickname “Dodek”, and Dobzhansky was going to be my own Ph.D. advisor, except that when I had to do my alternative service as a conscientious objector, Dobzhansky retired and moved to UC Davis, and could no longer take students. I then importuned Lewontin to take me, and he did, but that’s a long story. . . .

Dobzhansky is sitting in a characteristic pose, sitting at them microscope and reading chromosome inversions in Drosophila pseudoobscura or D. persimilis. That was the research he did: he had two high-class technicians who manipulated the flies and did the salivary-gland squashes to reveal the chromosomes, and Doby (an alternative to “Dodek”) read the slides to see the inversion karyotypes.

The bottom picture is me en déshabillé, photographed climbing Mount Lewontin (a tiny hillock south of Death Valley, named after Dick because he did fly-release work there). That photo was taken by Phil Ward, an old friend and a professor of entomology at UC Davis. We had gone to Death Valley for biology, I to collect flies and Phil to collect ants. I wanted to do a “first climb” of the tiny hillock, which others had climbed before, and so, to make it unique, I did it without clothes (I couldn’t do it without oxygen since no oxygen is required!). I am wearing shoes and my usual field Stetson. I autographed the photo and gave it to Dick, who put it on his wall beneath Dobzhansky’s.  I believe my autograph said something like “To Dick Lewontin, who has always climbed upwards towards the naked truth.”

Well, what the hell—it’s Friday.