RIP John Maynard Smith

Biologist John Maynard Smith has passed away. He is renowned for introducing game theoretic analysis into biology. Interestingly, he started his career as an engineer. Science blogger Carl Zimmer has written a nice obit that surveys his contributions:

Maynard Smith had the brilliant idea of apply game theory to evolution. The players in his game might be a population of elephant seals, each with its own genetically determined strategies for finding a mate. Different strategies would have different levels of success. One strategy might be to confront the biggest male on the beach, drive him away, and take his harem. That might work if a male was also big, but if he was small it was a strategy doomed to failure. So perhaps instead he might skulk at the edges of the colony and mate secretly with females from time to time, trying to avoid getting killed by the harem leader. It’s not a solution guaranteed to produce a lot of kids. But Maynard Smith showed that it’s also not necessarily a one-way ticket to extinction. Instead, it’s possible that the two strategies, one dominant and one minor, can come to a stable coexistence.

Scientists have found lots of these so-called evolutionarily stable stategies. Some male salmons who take the sneaky route actually commit their whole bodies to the strategy. Instead of bulking up their bodies and developing big sexual displays such as long jaws, they become small and invest their energies into growing massive testes that give them a large enough supply of sperm to make the most of their few tristes. Some evolutionarily stable stragies cycle from prominence to rareness and back over time, in a sort of rock-scissors-paper game …Genes have a role in personality, intelligence, and behavior, and there’s obviously a lot of variation in all these factors. It’s possible that these genes have, over millions of years, reached an evolutionarily stable state with one another.