John Maynard Smith Quotes & Sayings

As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes. I don't think they will want to see themselves as digital computers either. To be told by someone with impeccable scientific credentials that they are nothing of the kind can only be pleasing. — John Maynard Smith

This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step. — John Maynard Smith

Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled. — John Maynard Smith

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another. — John Maynard Smith

There is no theoretical reason to expect evolutionary lineages to increase in complexity with time, and no empirical evidence that they do so. Nevertheless, eukaryotic cells are more complex than prokaryotic ones, animals and plants are more complex than protists, and so on. This increase in complexity may have been achieved as a result of a series of major evolutionary transitions. These involved changes in the way information is stored and transmitted.
[The major evolutionary transitions, Nature 374, 227 - 232 (16 March 1994)] — John Maynard Smith

So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones. — John Maynard Smith

Mathematics is so much easier than words mathematics makes things clear that words merely muddle and confuse and mess up. — 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 — 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

Language changes very fast. — John Maynard Smith

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored. — John Maynard Smith

Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action. — 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

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

In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music. — 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

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

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me. — John Maynard Smith

Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations. — John Maynard Smith

You couldn't have human society without language. — John Maynard Smith