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George C. Williams, renowned evolutionary biologist and Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, passed away on 8 September 2010. As readers of Evolution know, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential and incisive evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. In Adaptation and Natural Selection (hereafter denoted A&NS) (Williams 1966a) and later writings, he helped to build a “science of adaptation.” Together with Randolph Nesse, he launched the field of “Darwinian medicine,” an evolutionary approach to human health and disease.
George was born in 1926. He received a B.A. in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1949 after military service, and then his M.A. (1952) and Ph.D. (1955) from University of California, Los Angeles, where he was trained as an ichthyologist. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago and 5 years as an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, he joined the faculty of the nascent State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1960, where he played a key role in establishing both the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the Marine Sciences Research Center. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1990. He was vice president (1974) and later president (1989) of the Society for the Study of Evolution, editor of The American Naturalist (1975–1979), and devoted to the Quarterly Review of Biology. He was named Eminent Ecologist by the Ecological Society of America (1989), received the Daniel Giraud Elliott Award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1992), and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1993). With John Maynard Smith and Ernst Mayr, he was corecipient of the prestigious Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Swedish Royal Academy, in 1999.
