George c. williams biography

George C. Williams (1839–1926) was a soldier in the Union Army during the American Civil War who was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Biography

Williams was born in England on December 9, 1839.^[1] He emigrated to the United States and joined the Union Army during the American Civil War. He served as quartermaster sergeant of the 1st Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment.

He received the Medal of Honor for gallantry in action on June 27, 1862, at Gaines Mill, Virginia. The medal was issued to Williams on August 28, 1897.^[2]

Williams died on November 14, 1926. He is interred at the Cedar Grove Cemetery in New London, Connecticut.

Medal of Honor citation

While on duty with the wagon train as quartermaster sergeant he voluntarily left his place of safety in the rear, joined a company, and fought with distinguished gallantry through the action.

References

[George C. Williams:] Evolution, in the sense of long-term change in a sexually reproducing population, depends on the relative rates of survival of competing genes. Given that organisms may find themselves in an environment where there are close genealogical relatives, it follows that an organism is expected to react to cues of kinship in a certain way, so as to discriminate among the individuals it encounters on the basis of kinship, and be more benign and cooperative toward closer kin than more distant kin or nonrelatives.

My interest in evolution started in the summer of 1947, when I spent six weeks in the Painted Desert with a paleontologist named Sam Welles, who had a group of students there, officially in a summer course, but we spent most of the time swinging picks and shovels, digging fossils, as part of Welles' research project. He was a specialist in Triassic amphibians. Evenings were spent sitting around the campfire talking about things like evolution. For the first time in my life, people — real biologists, real s

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