George Williams

American evolutionary biologist whose Adaptation and Natural Selection purged teleological and group-selectionist thinking from evolutionary biology — one of the most important theoretical works in the history of the discipline.

Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966): a systematic critique of group selection and sloppy adaptationist thinking — insisting that selection acts primarily at the level of the gene, not the group or species. Independently arrived at the gene's-eye view before Dawkins popularized it. The evolution of senescence: aging as an adaptive cost — antagonistic pleiotropy.