John Maynard Smith Quotations

Societies depend on agreed rules.

You couldn't have human society without language.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

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

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.

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

Language changes very fast.

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.

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

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

Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

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.