John Maynard Smith
Smith, John Maynard (1920-) was a world-renowned British evolutionary biologist and author of numerous books on evolution, both scientific and popular. He was acclaimed for his study of the parallels between game theory and the eolutionary “strategies” that occur at a biological level to maintain a specie's existence.
Smith studied engineering at Cambridge University and worked as an aircraft engineer from 1941 through 1947. He returned to school and earned a B.Sc. degree in zoology in 1951 from University College, London. In 1965, he became a professor of biology at the University of Sussex and has been professor emeritus since 1985. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1977.
One of Smith's enduring interests as an evolutionary biologist has been studying the ways in which an organism utilizes information in order to evolve and how this information at times results in major evolutionary transition points in an organism or species. In 1982, he published the groundbreaking Evolution and the Theory of Games, in which he applied game theory to the process evolutionary selection. Game theory, developed in the 1940's by John von Neumann, has shown that in games such as chess or poker, the optimal strategy for winning may change, depending on the actions of the opponents.
Smith found a similar “evolutionary stable strategy” occurring in nature, in that natural selection of characteristics within a population of competing species is guided by he impulse for balance, thus optimizing the chances for survival of each species.
Smith's many awards included the Royal Society's Darwin Medal in 1986, the Balzan Prize in 1991, the Royal Medal in 1997, and both the Copley Medal and the Royal Swedish Academy's Crafoord Prize in 1999.