Hefner Lecture:
Geerat Vermeij, "Moving Among Realms: Life in Fresh Water, the Sea, and on Land"


Geerat Vermeij, Distinguished Professor, Department of Geology, UC Davis, has received a MacArthur Award and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
An evolutionary biologist and paleontologist, his interests include marine ecology and paleoecology; the functional morphology of marine molluscs; the coevolutionary reactions between predators and prey and their effects on morphology, ecology, and evolution.

He may be best known for his work chronicling the "arms race" among long-extinct molluscs and their predators.

Blind since the age of three, Dr. Vermeij has published nearly a hundred scientific papers and numerous books, including Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life, A Natural History of Shells, an autobiography entitled Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life, and The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization.

He served as editor for Evolution, has a world-class collection of shells, and is "an intrepid field naturalist and explorer of the coasts of nearly every continent."