[1][2][3] 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.

In Sex and Evolution (1975), he attempted to explain why many species use exclusive sexual reproduction despite its “twofold cost".

In Natural Selection (1992), Williams argued that these phenomena cannot be explained by selectively-driven allele substitutions within populations, the evolutionary mechanism he had originally championed over all others.

[12] He won the Crafoord Prize for Bioscience jointly with Ernst Mayr and John Maynard Smith in 1999.

Because the statute of limitations had expired, Williams narrowly escaped strict disciplinary action, in addition to criminal prosecution.