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John Maynard Smith - Adaptation at the organism level (75/102)

1,019 views · Published 8 March 2017 · 1:01 · Indexed 10 November 2026

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

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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 want to... really to think about adaptation at the organism level, as I'm sure you do, reading your books. I mean you want to understand why an albatross flies the way it does. Let's face it, you talk about the albatross, you don't talk about the genes of the albatross. And the reason you can get away with this, is... I think it's your analogy, the men in the boat; I mean, if you really can't jump from boat to boat too easily, there's nothing for it but to keep time with the other seven guys and row as fast as you can. And I think that most of the time in eukaryotes, genes have to rub shoulders, they have to be good mixers and so on. And I guess the same is true, to some extent, in prokaryotes, but I am increasingly struck by the frequency with which genes jump across big distances in prokaryotes and find themselves in quite unfamiliar backgrounds. And I think if we come back and look at bacterial population genetics, in 10 years time, it's going to be a very gene-centred science.

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