My parents were Canadian, my dad from Montreal and my mom from a small town a hundred miles or so farther north in Quebec, known as Ste. Sophie. (Their parents, in turn, were immigrants from Eastern Europe.) I grew up in New York, specifically Far Rockaway, by the beaches and sand dunes of what was then rural Long Island. I attended Harpur College, State University of New York at Binghamton, and graduated as a biology major in 1966. Then it was off to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1970. For my dissertation, I studied the social behavior and ecology of mountain-dwelling animals known as Olympic marmots. I developed a general theory that explained their unusual degree of social tolerance and integration, by relating their natural history to their high-elevation environments.

     After teaching for three years in upstate New York, at the State University at Oneonta, I accepted a position in the Psychology Department at the University of Washington, in 1973, and have been here ever since.

     I am gleefully married to Judith Eve Lipton, a psychiatrist who specializes in women's health. Together, we have engaged in quite a bit of antinuclear activism, child-rearing, hiking, riding, arguing, and book-writing. We live on about 10 acres in Redmond, Washington, with four horses, four dogs, six cats, a remarkably demanding cockatoo and a three-legged turtle named Trike. My eldest daughter, Eva, lives in New York where she is a yoga teacher extraordinaire (with several DVDs to her credit). Ilona has recently finished an MD/Ph.D. program in San Diego, and is currently doing a residency in emergency medicine. And Nell, the youngest, is graduating rom Swarthmore and applying to veterinary school, with a particular interest in relating the world of micro-organisms to that of vertebrates.