John Maynard Smith - 20th century biology as a 'science of information' (95/102)

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The late British biologist John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) is famous for applying game theory to the study of natural selection. In 1973 Maynard Smith formalised a central concept in game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). His ideas, presented in books such as 'Evolution and the Theory of Games', were enormously influential and led to a more rigorous scientific analysis and understanding of interactions between living things. [Listener: Richard Dawkins; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: I think what's happened, in the 20th century, and a bit at the end of the 19th, is that we have been surrounded by machinery which transduces information; tape recorders, record players and telephone... what we're doing now, film and television and so on, all are machines which change information from one form to another, telephones and so on. And prior to about 1880, nobody had this notion of information being something which could be coded and transformed. And biology, during this century, has become increasingly concerned with... precisely with information. Genetics is the question of how the information is transmitted between generations, molecular biology is concerned with how it's translated from DNA into protein. Developmental biology is concerned with how it's translated from the sort of... a set of proteins into a morphological structure. And evolutionary theory essentially is about how the information got there in the first place. And I think you could almost characterise the 20th century in biology as the century in which it became the science of information in living systems. Lots of biologists wouldn't like that because it's not what they do. But I think that's what's really new about biology in this century.

[RD] Yes.