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PRESENTATION OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY MEDAL TO GEERAT J. VERMEIJ

Friends and Colleagues: I am delighted and honored to introduce this year's recipient of the Paleontological Society Medal, Geerat J. Vermeij.

I did not study with Gary or work at the same institution with him. Nor have I ever collaborated with him. Nevertheless, Geerat Vermeij is one of my personal heroes. With the exception of the late Stephen Jay Gould, no one has exerted a greater influence on my scientific thought.

As a student of Steve Gould, I had been persuaded that most evolution occurred in speciation events, that ecological relationships were thus unimportant in evolution, and that the history of life displayed no inherent directionality. Yet, as I pursued my own studies of Miocene molluscs from Maryland, something didn't seem right. Though my work did indeed document much evolution occurring at speciation, certain traits such as shell thickness displayed distinct long-term directional trends—something Steve said shouldn't happen. Tellingly, the species with the greatest directional change also were the most common victims of predation by shell-drilling naticid gastropods. Ecology had to matter in the evolution of these molluscs, and Vermeij's 1987 book, Evolution and Escalation: An Ecologic History of Life, helped me understand how and why. Organisms do evolve in response to their enemies; Miocene bivalves evolved thicker shells in response to naticid predation, but the naticids themselves evolved in response to their own enemies, and not to their benign prey. Vermeij termed this process of adaptation to enemies “escalation” and …