John Maynard Smith quotes

John Maynard Smith was a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist, renowned for his work in applying game theory to evolution. His insights helped shape the field of evolutionary biology, particularly in understanding animal behavior and evolutionarily stable strategies. He made significant contributions through both research and science communication. Here are 16 of his quotes:

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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
John Maynard Smith
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. View quote
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. View quote
John Maynard Smith
Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of 'design' that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study. View quote
John Maynard Smith
Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations. View quote
John Maynard Smith
The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology. View quote
John Maynard Smith
Societies depend on agreed rules. View quote
John Maynard Smith
Language changes very fast. View quote
John Maynard Smith
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)
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. View quote
John Maynard Smith
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. View quote
John Maynard Smith
Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored. View quote
John Maynard Smith
I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another. View quote
John Maynard Smith
You couldn't have human society without language. View quote
John Maynard Smith