John Maynard Smith and evolutionary game theory

When John Maynard Smith passed away on April 19, 2004, most obituaries expressed the view that among the amazing wealth of his contributions to theoretical biology, the most significant was the introduction of game theoretical methods for the analysis of evolutionary problems. JMS would probably have agreed with this. In an essay entitled 'Evolution and the Theory of Games' (Maynard Smith 1976), he set out to trace the history of this idea. With his characteristic blend of generosity and objectivity, he made it clear that he was not the first to discover the usefulness of game theory in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, it is right to view him as the father of evolutionary game theory...

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