PERSON
John Maynard Smith
The aeronautical engineer turned evolutionary biologist who gave us the evolutionarily stable strategy and the framework of the major transitions in information—and whose two central ideas turn out, without any forcing, to describe the terrain that artificial intelligence is now walking into.
John Maynard Smith came to biology by way of the machine shop, and he never lost the engineer's habit of asking what a structure is for and how well it does the job. He spent the Second World War as a stressman computing where an airframe would buckle under load, then wrote to J.B.S. Haldane asking how a man might become a biologist instead. He brought the engineer's questions with him: not whether a wing is beautiful but whether it works, and whether its working can be written down as a model simple enough to be wrong in instructive ways. The result was evolutionary game theory and its central object, the
evolutionarily stable strategy—a configuration of behaviors that, once common in a population, cannot be displaced by any invading alternative. He built it with George Price in 1973, and it gave biology a rigorous account of why populations of self-interested agents settle