Quotes by John Maynard Smith

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I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.
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In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.
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I can’t go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.
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Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed.
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You couldn’t have human society without language.
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Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe.
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Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population.
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Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.
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Paradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it was originally designed
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Scientific theories tell us what is possible; myths tell us what is desirable. Both are needed to guide proper action.
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