Look Who it Was Random video

John Maynard Smith - Difficulty publishing papers in the 1950s (14/102)

2,432 views · Published 20 March 2017 · 1:38 · Indexed 27 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

Watch on YouTube

To hear more of John Maynard Smith’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b0Nm_L3TKg&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzJSvAc4MBuUP_GrjO1lLHp

The late British biologist John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) is famous for applying game theory to the study of natural selection. In 1973 Maynard Smith formalised a central concept in game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). His ideas, presented in books such as 'Evolution and the Theory of Games', were enormously influential and led to a more rigorous scientific analysis and understanding of interactions between living things. [Listener: Richard Dawkins; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: I had great difficulty in publishing papers about animal locomotion in the '50s. I... I would never have been able to publish this story about the stability of flight if Haldane hadn't bullied the editor of Evolution into publishing it. It was rejected when I submitted it, on the grounds that the author clearly didn't know anything about aerodynamics, which did slightly annoy me, I have to say. If they'd written and said the author clearly doesn't know anything about birds, I would have thought, well, fair enough, but damn it. Then I tried to publish a paper about... about Animal Gaits. It was one of the first optimisation papers every written, I think, in which I showed that the gaits of animals optimised their expenditure of energy at a given speed. And to prove this, I actually differentiated something, and I had an equation, d2w by dj2 = 0, or something. And the referee actually said, 'Why doesn't the author cancel the ds?' I mean, in those days, it was just impossible. And there was a deep anti-theoretic... anti-theoretical sort of culture in... in biology. You were not allowed to have theoretical ideas, except, perhaps in population and genetics, because Haldane and Fisher had made it respectable in population genetics. But in morphology, which I was tampering with, you know, why are animals the shapes they are, you just couldn't do it. It'd be different now.

More from this channel