The John Maynard Smith reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

John Maynard Smith

John Maynard Smith¹ (6 January 1920 - 19 April 2004) was a classical geneticist and leading theorist in evolutionary biology. His contributions also included work as an aeronautical engineer, and as a game theory mathematician. The son of a surgeon, he was inspired by a science fiction story by Olaf Stapledon, named Last and First Men. Purportedly, Arthur C. Clarke was inspired to write science fiction stories by reading the same book, from the same public library.

Maynard Smith applied the zero-sum contests and win-win evaluation schemes from game theory to show that competition among males of a species would not tend to be lethal, but would have limited actual fighting and a large quantity of posturing and other non-aggressive display behaviour. This game-theoretic explanation has been largely accepted by theorists and other biologists in the field. In 1982, his book Evolution and the Theory of Games explained the application of game theory to biological science. This book explained how evolutionarily stable strategy is relevant to the field.

He studied at Eton College and then engineering at Cambridge. During World War II, he worked in aeronautical engineering in "stress testing" airplane components.

After the war he studied genetics under the famous J. B. S. Haldane at University College London. In recent years he was Professor at the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Sussex.

Maynard Smith was awarded several prizes (including the Kyoto Prize and Crafoord Prize) for his work.

With Eörs Szathmáry, he wrote a book The Major Transitions in Evolution which has been very influential in recent years. A popular science version of the book, entitled The Origins of Life: From the birth of life to the origin of language was published in 1999

In his honor, the European Society for Evolutionary Biology has an award for extra-ordinary young evolutionary biology researchers named The John Maynard Smith Prize. It has been awarded every other year since 1997. The 1997 winner was Marie-Charlotte Anstett for Facilitation and constraints in the evolution of mutualism. The 1999 winner was Nicolas Galtier for Non stationary models of nucleotide substitution and the evolution of base composition.

External links

• Press release anouncing his death
• Tribute from his colleagues

Footnote

1. Note that his surname was Maynard Smith, not Smith, and nor was it hyphenated.

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