The distinguished botanist, conservationist, and environmentalist Hugh Iltis died on December 19, 2016, according to the University of Wisconsin (December 30, 2016). Iltis was particularly famous for his important research on the evolution of maize from teosinte, as well as on tomatoes and spider flowers (genus Cleome), but he was also a fierce environmentalist and one of the first scientists to articulate the idea that humans are innately attracted to nature. The university's obituary summarized the interconnection of evolution, ecology, and environmentalism in his thinking: "To Iltis, plants represented stories and places. And they embodied the evolutionary web of their ancestors — and their descendants — assuming they could survive 'progress.'"
A lifetime member of NCSE, Iltis was deeply concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution. In 2005, after the school board in the Wisconsin town of Grantsburg passed a third version of a resolution apparently aimed at undermining the integrity of evolution instruction there, Iltis — then 79 — told the Capital Times, "Total lunacy. Embarrassing. A step back into the Dark Ages ... It's just an outrage," adding, "it's largely due to ignorance, to a generation of people who don't understand evolution and are scared to death about the world we're seeing now." Iltis was also critical of the state superintendent of schools and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for not criticizing the Grantsburg board publicly: although many of his colleagues feel as strongly as he does, he told the newspaper, "they don't like to get in the public arena and fight about it."
Iltis was born in Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia, on April 7, 1925; his father, Hugo Iltis, was the first biographer of Gregor Mendel. He emigrated to the United States in 1938. After a year at the University of Tennessee, he served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946. After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1948, he received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1952. He taught for three years at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and then in 1955 joined the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he spent the remainder of his career. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1963; his honors also included the Asa Gray Award for 1994 from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.