George Christopher Williams

In 1992, Williams was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He won the Crafoord Prize for Bioscience jointly with Ernst Mayr and John Maynard Smith in 1999. Richard Dawkins describes Williams as "one of the most respected of American evolutionary biologists".

Williams supervised an undergraduate project in 1985 which consisted of a student, Mitchell Behm, tossing live animals into tubs with domesticated ferrets, which Behm subsequently admitted he partly did "for his own amusement." Dr. Charles Middleton, Director of the Division of Laboratory Animal Resources stated, "If animals are just going to tear each other up, the experiment would not have been approved." Ferrets were illegal in New York at the time, without a license, which neither individual had.

The experiments were in direct violation of the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and its PHS policy amendment introducing the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee model, to which SUNY and all of its researchers were subject in 1988.

Williams was a professor of biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who was best known for his vigorous critique of group selection. The work of Williams in this area, along with W. D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, and others led to the development of the gene-centered view of evolution in the 1960s.

Williams' 1957 paper Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence is one of the most influential in 20th century evolutionary biology, and contains at least 3 foundational ideas. The central hypothesis of antagonistic pleiotropy remains the prevailing evolutionary explanation of senescence. In this paper Williams was also the first to propose that senescence should be generally synchronized by natural selection. According to this original formulation

This important concept of synchrony of senescence was taken up a short time later by John Maynard Smith, and the origin of the idea is often misattributed to him, including in his obituary in the journal Nature. Finally, Williams' 1957 paper was the first to outline the "grandmother hypothesis". William's formulation stated that natural selection might select for menopause and post-reproductive life in females (though not explicitly mentioning grandchildren or the inclusive fitness contribution of grand-parenting).

Williams received a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1955. At Stony Brook he taught courses in marine vertebrate zoology, and he often used ichthyological examples in his books.

George Christopher Williams (May 12, 1926 – September 8, 2010) was an American evolutionary biologist.