Maynard Smith, John

Maynard Smith, John
▪ 2005

      British evolutionary biologist (b. Jan. 6, 1920, London, Eng.—d. April 19, 2004, Lewes, East Sussex, Eng.), was renowned for explaining evolutionary strategies, especially the origin of sex, by means of the mathematical theory of games. Maynard Smith graduated (1941) from Trinity College, Cambridge, with an engineering degree. Having been rejected for World War II military service because of poor eyesight, he worked on military aircraft design (1942–47). Thereafter, he went to University College, London (UCL), to study zoology with geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a fellow Marxist and member of the Communist Party who became his mentor. After earning his doctorate in 1951, Maynard Smith remained at UCL as a lecturer. He quit the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. In 1965 he left UCL to become the founding dean of the School of Biological Sciences at Sussex University, where he remained until his retirement in 1985. Among his major books were The Theory of Evolution (1958), The Evolution of Sex (1978), Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982), The Major Transitions in Evolution (with Hungarian biochemist Eors Szathmary, 1995), and Animal Signals (2003). Maynard Smith was a recipient of Sweden's Crafoord Prize in 1999 and the Kyoto Prize in 2001.

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