Innovative and entrepreneurial, with a deep desire for human service, he worked tirelessly to educate people in scientific thinking.

William Emerson Ritter was born on a farm on November 21, 1856, in Hampden Township, Columbia County, Wisconsin.

The Ritter household included William, his brother Frank, his sisters Mary, Ella, and Flora, and his maternal grandparents, Nathan and Ruby Eason.

The family worked hard on the farm, cultivating corn, wheat, potatoes, apples, and other crops.

Ritter was so impressed by the book, and its thoughtful, unbiased perspectives, that he made the decision to go to the University of California and study with Joseph LeConte.

[1] He spent a few summers at Marine Laboratories, and in 1891 was given a job teaching biology at the University of California in Berkeley.

[2] The couple honeymooned at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego; they spent part of their time on marine research, collecting blind goby fish in the ocean near Point Loma.

Ritter, like many of his contemporaries, believed it was important to study living things in their natural environment rather than isolate them in laboratory conditions.

Between 1892 and 1902, he and his colleagues set up temporary research sites at Pacific Grove, Avalon Bay, and San Pedro Harbor.

In early 1903, Ritter established a biological laboratory in the Hotel del Coronado's boathouse at Glorietta Bight.

At the end of the year, the Marine Biological Association of San Diego was founded with Ritter as scientific director.

[2] Donations by Ellen Browning Scripps made possible the construction of a pier, a public aquarium, and a library-museum building.

It seemed to be an odd couple, as Ritter was kind, quiet, and scholarly, and Scripps was opinionated and boisterous, a self-described "damned old crank."

Ritter and Scripps, on the other hand, believed that it was critical to share these scientific discoveries, and by doing so, would help people to "think like a scientist"—with a reasoned thoughtfulness.

One school of thought was mechanism, which believed that there is no essential difference between a rock and a human life—it's simply a matter of the chemistry involved.

At the time of his death, on January 10, 1944, he had 5 book-length unpublished manuscripts written, and parts of many other books and articles.

His literary executor, Edna Bailey, consolidated his manuscripts and published sections of them, posthumously, under the title Charles Darwin and the Golden Rule.