John Maynard Smith
9 quotes
Biography
John Maynard Smith 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 biologist J.
"It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be subjected to criticism.... It does not follow that, because a position is orthodox, it is wrong."
"Тhе сепtгаl роіпt геmаіпs that Darwin provided a theory which predicts that organisms should have parts adapted to ensure their survival and . This has led to the suggestion that life should be defined by the possession of those properties which are needed to ensure evolution by natural selection. That is, entities with the properties of multiplication, variation, and are alive, and entities lacking one or more of those properties are not."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"The theory of games was first formalised by Von Neumann & Morgenstern (1953) in reference to human economic behaviour. Since that time, the theory has undergone extensive development... Sensibly enough, a central assumption of classical game theory is that the players will behave rationally, and according to some criterion of self-interest. Such an assumption would clearly be out of place in an evolutionary context. Instead, the criterion of rationality is replaced by that of population dynamics and stability, and the criterion of self-interest by Darwinian fitness."
"Game theory concepts were first explicitly applied in evolutionary biology by Lewontin (1961). His approach, however, was to picture a species as playing a game against nature, and to seek strategies which minimised the probability of extinction. A similar line has been taken by Slobodkin & Rapoport (1974). In contrast, here we picture members of a population as playing games against each other, and consider the population dynamics and equilibria which can arise."
"John Maynard Smith, an engineer by training, knows much about his biology secondhand. He seldom deals with live organisms. He computes and he reads. I suspect that it's very hard for him to have insight into any group of organisms when he does not deal with them directly. Biologists, especially, need direct sensory communication with the live beings they study and about which they write."