John Maynard Smith 6 January 1920-19 April 2004

摘要

I first met John Maynard Smith in 1979 when he came to India to participate in the Mahabaleshwar Seminar on Modern Biology. The theme of the Seminar that year was 'Evolution of Social Behaviour'. It was an extraordinarily lively meeting, held just when the sociobiology debates were hotting up. I still remember his talk vividly. He spoke on Group Selection and the fallacy of Wynne-Edwards's approach, which depended on the existence of adaptations that were advantageous to the group but disadvantageous to the individual. Mahabaleshwar is a picturesque hill resort and no one who goes there can forget the loud, periodic, synchronous calls of hundreds of cicadas. Right in the middle of Maynard Smith's lecture, just when he was describing Wynne-Edwards's theory, there erupted a burst of cicada singing. In an impressively rapid reaction, Maynard Smith said something along the following lines: "If Wynne-Edwards were here he would surely have argued that the cicadas are singing in unison in order to assess their population density. Then they would adjust their rate of reproduction so that the habitat would not be over-exploited and the species would not run the risk of going extinct".