George C. Williams
George Christopher Williams (1926–2010) was an American evolutionary biologist, professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, known for the theory of antagonistic pleiotropy and for his rigorous critique of loose group-selectionist reasoning in evolutionary biology.
Antagonistic pleiotropy
In his 1957 paper “Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence”, Williams proposed that genes with beneficial effects early in life and harmful effects late in life can be strongly favored by selection, because the force of selection declines with age. This theory made aging an evolved side effect of early-life adaptation rather than a program of wear, and it
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