A Conversation With John Maynard Smith

Jonathan Weiner

A classical geneticist and leading theorist in evolutionary biology, John Maynard Smith started out as an engineer and worked as a "stress man" during World War II, calculating the stresses in airplane wings. Since then, he has applied his knowledge of mathematics to some of the greatest problems in evolution--exploring the stress points, the places where the theory threatens to pop its rivets.

Maynard Smith is best known for using game theory to explain the jousting matches that one sees among the males of many species, from sticklebacks to sea lions, from stag beetles to stags. "You'd simply expect them to sort of hit the other chap in the groin as quickly as possible," he says, "and yet there's rather little escalated fighting and a great deal of display in settling contests." It's almost as if the combatants are cooperating--a paradox the biologist explains by invoking the mathematics of nonzero-sum contests and win-win situations.

At the University of Sussex in England, where he works, Maynard Smith is closely involved with a group of colleagues he calls "The Institute for the Study of Tiny Minds": neurobiologists working on the behavior of ants, bees, worms, and snails. He also talks daily with colleagues across disciplines who, like him, are trying to apply the theory of natural selection to the design of robots and computers.

JW: How did you get interested in biology? Does science run in your family?

JMS: My father was a poor boy who made good, who became a surgeon. But I can't remember anything of him; I was only eight when he died, and my mother and her family, with whom I grew up, were really not intellectuals. After my father died, we went to live in the country, in western Britain, and I became obsessed with birds. My Auntie Mary gave me a guide, A Birdbook for the Pocket, which had a picture of each of the British species in it. And oh, the excitement of going through the book: "That's a robin, that's a green finch, that's a blue tit!" But the interesting thing is that I did know them all. The experience has persuaded me ever since that, at least in birds, species are real things. Because any kid would have got the species right. It's not something that we impose upon nature, it is something that is there to be recognized.

JW: I hear you read a lot of science fiction.

JMS: Yes. Possibly most influential in making me interested in genetics and in evolution was a strange book by a man called Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men. It's a history of the next--oh, I don't know--100 million years of human history. It's not terribly well written, but the book's thesis is that there will be a succession of human civilizations that collapse. And it isn't until human beings deliberately change their own constitution to make themselves less aggressive and more friendly that a stable civilization can be made. Although I no longer believe that the only path to human betterment is to change our genes, I was really persuaded by the argument at the time.

Many years later, I read a collection of short stories by Arthur C. Clarke. In the preface he describes how, as a boy, he read Stapledon's Last and First Men and how this led him into sciencefiction writing. And he had taken the book out of the same local public library. Whatever librarian put that book on the counter has got a lot to answer for. Made my hair stand on end when I read that!

Possible Worlds, by the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, also impressed me. I was at Eton, where I was not very happy. The school had virtues--it taught me mathematics very well. But it was really anti-intellectual, it was snobbish, it was arrogant; it just wasn't a pleasant atmosphere. There was one person whom my schoolmasters would speak of with real hatred, and that was J. B. S. Haldane. He was also a socialist, an atheist, a divorce, and a Marxist. I remember thinking, "Anybody they hate so much can't be all bad. I must go and find out about him."

JW: By then you knew that you loved biology. What made you shoot off in another direction?

JMS: My family supposed that I was going to join my grandfather's stockbroking business. And I realized at the age of about sixteen, I think, that whatever else I was going to spend my life doing, it wasn't that. So I announced at Sunday lunch one day, "Look, I've decided that I'm not going to become a stockbroker." And you could have heard a pin drop. My grandfather turned to me and said, "All right, boy, what are you going to do then?" So I said the first thing that came to my head. Literally, on the spot, I said, "I'm going to be an engineer." And I went to Cambridge to read engineering.

During the war, I worked for a little company called Myles Aircraft. But when the war ended, I went back to college and took a second degree, or biology. I chose University College London because I knew that Haldane was a professor there and I thought it would be interesting to learn from him. And "interesting," I think, is probably the right word.

JW: Not an easy man?

JMS: He was fascinated by almost any intellectual problem you would like to bring to him. He was very encouraging to young people. He was, on the other hand, somewhat frightening to be around. He weighed about seventeen stone [240 pounds], and most of it was muscle. He had an extremely short fuse, and he didn't suffer fools very well. I lived always afraid that he would realize I was really rather stupid. And by his standards I think I was. He never built up a big group around him because of these rather abrasive characteristics. He taught me everything I know. I wept when he died.

JW: Your latest book is about recurring patterns in the history of life. How did you come to write such a panoramic book?

JMS: Well, it was very much of a joint enterprise with Eors Szathmary. We met in 1985 or thereabouts and realized that our minds work together in a very nice way. I mean, he knows all sorts of things I don't know--he really knows molecular biology and chemistry. Eventually we realized that a mathematical model I had made years before, of the evolution of social groups, was extremely similar to one he had developed to try to understand the very early, evolution of life. We were really working on the same problem; it was just that one was about animals and the other one was about molecules. You could see enormous parallels between events that happened very early on in the origin of chromosomes and events that happened much later (after 2,000 million years of life's sloshing around doing nothing) in the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

JW: You think such different events are fundamentally alike?

JMS: These transitions are all concerned with the storage and passage of information. It's fascinating, for instance, to try to model the evolution of the genes together with the evolution of human language--not identical events but at bottom very similar. But by inventing language, we've put ourselves in an unprecedented position. Absolutely. Human beings are enormously influenced by what, for want of a better word, I call myth or ritual. The ability is adaptive, because any individual who lived in a society and could not learn and pick up the cultural beliefs and mores of that society very quickly would be ostracized.

JW: One of life's "major transitions," you point out, was when mitochondria--probable descendants of parasites--swam into bigger cells and then got trapped inside and put to work. What about computers and us? Is this the next transition?

JMS: We like to think that computers are our slaves. It does seem to be possible that the relationship might be inverted.

Jonathan Weiner's most recent book, Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior (Knopf, 1999), is a biography of the molecular biologist Seymour Benzer. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999.

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