John Maynard Smith Quotes

United Kingdom, Biologist
January 6, 1920 – April, 19, 2004.

John Maynard Smith[a] FRS (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.

Also known as Geneticist

Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.

John Maynard Smith
Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.

John Maynard Smith
- Thinking
- Game

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

John Maynard Smith
Societies depend on agreed rules.

John Maynard Smith
The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

John Maynard Smith
- Sex
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.

John Maynard Smith
- Life
- Up
- May
You couldn't have human society without language.

John Maynard Smith
- Society
The last decade has seen a steady increase in the application of concepts from the theory of games to the study of evolution. Fields as diverse as sex ratio theory, animal distribution, contest behaviour and reciprocal altruism have contributed to what is now emerging as a universal way of thinking about phenotypic evolution.

John Maynard Smith
- Thinking
- Study
- Sex

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

John Maynard Smith
It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be suggested to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong.

John Maynard Smith
- Nature
- Science
- Criticism
Language changes very fast.

John Maynard Smith
It is an occupational risk of biologists to claim, towards the end of their careers, that the problems which they have not solved are insoluble.

John Maynard Smith
- Risk
Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed

John Maynard Smith
- Game