John Maynard Smith brought games into evolutionary biology, and persuaded his colleagues that sex is a problem. He is a self-styled puzzle-solver; the puzzles he has tackled range in scale from courtship in fruit flies to the origins of life. Over the past 40 years, he has been a leader of the scientific project that overhauled and renewed evolutionary thinking, a project that made Darwinism the determined and expansive intellectual force it is today. After a half-century in science, he is the senior statesman of British evolutionary biology and, at 83, he remains a working biologist.
It was at Eton in the 1930s that the seeds of his scientific life were sown. Unhappy and alienated, he discovered Darwinism and consequently atheism. He also encountered the writings of the biologist J B S Haldane, an intellectual celebrity and an apostate Etonian – the mixture of rationalism, mathematics and atheism made him feel that he wasn’t alone in the world. He became a communist while at Cambridge, but ignored the party line when the war broke out by attempting to join the army. He was rejected because of his poor eyesight and told to finish his engineering degree, which he then applied to calculating stress in aircraft design. After the war, his interest in evolution drew him to genetics, and his admiration for Haldane took him to University College London, where the latter was a professor. Haldane became Maynard Smith’s mentor; Maynard Smith remains Haldane’s vicar on earth.
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