George Morgan Davis (1938 – 2024): The Director’s Cut

Dillon, R.T., Jr., G. Rosenberg & P.M. Mikkelsen (2025) George Morgan Davis (1938 - 2024): Life, work, and legacy.  Malacologia 68: 3 - 26. [pdf]

The email was delivered to my inbox in the mid-afternoon Thursday, June 20, 2024, and I don’t remember being terribly surprised by the news.  Dr. George M. Davis, my major advisor at Penn 1977 – 1982 was dead.  His wife, my old friend Elaine Hoagland, was asking me to pass the word along to the wider malacological community.

King George was the last monarch of American Malacology, guiding our discipline from the classical typology of the 19th century to the neoclassical typology of the present day.  I posted single-paragraph tributes on Facebook and the Mollusca list server early that next morning, and was gratified to see how rapidly the word spread.

George M. Davis (1938 - 2024)

Gary Rosenberg, George’s successor at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, stepped forward to offer a memorial at the annual meeting of the American Malacological Society, upcoming just six weeks away in Pasadena, and President Pat Krug found room on the program.  Gary also began to compile a bibliography of George’s published works at that time.

Elaine also mentioned to me, in the days immediately following her husband’s death, that she had separately contacted our colleague Chuck Lydeard, George’s immediate successor as Editor-In-Chief of Malacologia, about a special volume of to be published in his memory as well.  I suppose I had assumed that Gary would take the lead on George’s professional obituary for that volume, just as he had taken the lead for the oral tribute at the AMS. 

So, the email from Chuck that arrived in my inbox 15Aug25 surprised me quite a lot.  Chuck confirmed that an entire issue of Malacologia, dedicated to the memory of my influential mentor, was indeed nearing completion.  Paula Mikkelsen and Alan Kabat had joined Gary Rosenberg to compile an extensive GMD bibliography, now grown to 200 titles, together with lists of all the species and higher taxa he had described, all the species named for him, and all the articles written about him, for publication as the lead article in that memorial issue.  But none of our distinguished colleagues apparently felt called to write a biography of the man to explain all the fuss. Nor could anybody else alive on God’s green earth be found to volunteer.

 

And so at this late date, 14 months into a 15-month project, with every other option exhausted and time running out, pushed beyond the point of despair, Chuck Lydeard was contacting me to ask if I would take the lead authorship of the lead article in a George M. Davis memorial issue of Malacologia.  My coauthors Rosenberg and Mikkleson would contribute the bibliography half, and I the biography half.  My deadline would be the end of September, six weeks away.

 

And I felt duty-bound to accept.  I didn’t like George Davis.  I don’t know anybody who did.  And although I did work closely with him during that brief window 1977 – 1982, and got to know him better than I cared to during those five years, after I left Philadelphia we really did not keep in touch.  Our areas of research interest just barely intersected, and our philosophies of science not at all.

 

But George Davis helped me.  He administered the best facilities for malacological research in the world at that time, and he made the superb ANSP collections, the wonderful library, the modern laboratory, and rooms full of equipment and cabinets bulging with supplies all available to me, free and without obligation, and otherwise left me alone, and that is exactly what I needed.

 

So, I went to work on a tribute for my major advisor.   And I confess I did not quite make my deadline, but by the first week of October had a first draft ready to share with my coauthors.  Divided into six sections, that first draft reviewed George’s 60-year career, contextualized his manifold scientific contributions, and transmitted some feeling for the outsized influence he wielded in American Malacology during the latter half of the 20th Century, an influence that continues to the present day.  And in an effort to humanize the man, each of those six sections was introduced with a story, told in the first person, in which I reminisced about my own personal experiences with my major advisor in the late 1970s.

 

And I added a top layer as well.  Looking back on 20th Century Malacology from a 25-year perspective, I found myself able to trace the evolution of our entire discipline in the career of Dr. George M. Davis.  Working on his dissertation at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology 1960 - 1965, Davis was born into classical, 19th-century typology.  But the Modern Synthesis of Darwin + Mendel was ascending, hypothesis-driven, grounded in the theory of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, rigorously scientific.  And just dawning at that very moment was a new age of molecules and computer analysis, ultimately to devolve into a 21st-century neoclassicism just as typological as the 19th.

 

Davis did, in fact, include a set of rigorously-designed breeding experiments in his dissertation research, published in 1967, as well as classical morphological studies and remarkably forward-looking protein electrophoretic analysis.  Yet even though his breeding studies answered the question his dissertation addressed, and neither the morphology nor the molecules contributed, Davis never tested another hypothesis throughout the remainder of his 60-year career.  Quoting myself directly: 

“George Davis had been baptized Presbyterian-form in modernity with his early laboratory experiments on hybridization, sprinkled not dunked.  Then finding objective, hypothesis-driven science too constraining, he jumped over the deeper waters of Fisher, Mayr, Dobzhansky and Simpson to the Neoclassical now, drawing our discipline along with him.”

 Well, such vivid language is never going to find publication in a scientific journal, and well I knew it, even as the Christian denominations were flying off my fingertips.  That first draft of early October was edited significantly by my coauthors, as is their right.  Paula, in particular, objected to my use of the first person in the reminiscences, which I certainly understand.  But conversion to the third person and the passive voice, much color is sacrificed.  And awkwardness left in the wake.

 

And Paula, Gary, and I kept Chuck Lydeard on the cc line as we passed the drafts around.  Rather early in the process Chuck alluded to sending our manuscript out for peer review, which seemed a wry comment on the vitality of our discipline.  “I’m not saying our science is dead, but in Malacology, obituaries are peer-reviewed.”  I needn’t have worried about that step, however, as Alan Kabat ultimately contributed a couple excellent insights which I was pleased to incorporate.

 

So, the George M. Davis Memorial issue of Malacologia was published in December, and the lead article by Dillon, Rosenberg and Mikkelsen is downloadable from this [pdf] link.  Although the paper as ultimately published does convey the overall flavor of the Scotch pie I baked in September, much of the spice has been lost.

 

Then for those of my readership who prefer their monthly dose of Rob Dillon redolent of creekbank, ancient tome, and spoiled ethanol, this month I have made FWGNA Circular #9 available for download from the website, here:

 

George Morgan Davis (1938-2024): The Director’s Cut

 

This version is very nearly that first early-October 2025 draft of my manuscript, unexpurgated, with a sprinkling of subsequent improvements.  It is missing the section on George Davis’ personal life, which was subsequently added by Gary Rosenberg, as well as the complete GMD bibliography and supporting sections as contributed by Gary and Paula working together. It does conclude with a literature-cited section, to the references cited in text only.  Also included are several nice figures not appearing in the published journal article, and a couple really good stories.  Bon appetite.