John Maynard Smith

Um, I'll try to make it as, a- accessible as possible, but there is a nice clean technical argument that I think takes this apart very, very quickly.

In evolution, there are w- there's a mathematical model of evolution b- made by John Maynard Smith.

So Darwin was not a mathematician.

His, his theory was deep and brilliant, but it wasn't mathematical.

John Maynard Smith and others made it mathematical with evolutionary game theory.

So we can now actually take Darwin's ideas and state them with mathematical precision, and start to prove theorems, and look at the details of his theory.

That was in the '70s that-

We knew that the assumptions could not be the final word, but a theory that tells you exactly where those assumptions fall apart is exactly the kind of tool for the best rigorous science.

Our guest this week is Ios Safmari.

He is one of the co-creators of the Major Transitions in Evolution Framework, along with John Maynard Smith, who's no longer with us.

Ios teaches at Hungary's Center for Ecological Research and is a leading kind of theoretical biologist.

The Major Transitions in Evolution Framework highlights how key jumps in the evolutionary process had to do not just with a new body plan or a new capability, but with things that used to be individual components bubbling up to become larger collectives, which then act in the interest of that greater pattern.

It's more exciting than that.

It's about the evolution of organizations and levels of organization throughout the almost 4 billion years of evolution.

And together with the late John Maynard Smith we identified a number of really very serious steps as they were in the origin and evolution of life, whereby a number of things you can identify again and again.

So one is that a higher level unit of evolution is being formed from lower level ones, right? The second important aspect that new ways of storing, using, and transmitting hereditary information arises.

Oh, yes.

Um, I, I once saw a documentary with an eminent British evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith.

Be recognizable to, to, uh, any evolutionary biologist.

And, and the British are champions at, at, ninjas at, at, at humblebragging.

It is of course true that great breakthroughs have been achieved by the transfer of skills between scientific fields.

For instance, by John Maynard Smith, trained as an engineer turning his attention to biology.

But in everyday practice, there are perfectly well-established methods of getting local results, and even if the results are not very exciting, they are results.

It follows from this that professional training exercises, however run-of-the-mill, make a contribution not just to education, but to the subject itself.