Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Professor John Maynard Smith 1920–2004

2004; Elsevier BV; Volume: 19; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tree.2004.05.007

1872-8383

Sean Nee,

Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

Professor John Maynard Smith FRS (Figure 1) was never Dr Maynard Smith – he did not have a PhD. Another fact that might surprise younger readers who are aware of his high profile is that he retired in 1985. In the time since his ‘retirement’, he published over 100 papers, commentaries and book reviews, maintaining his presence in the international temple of the intelligentsia, the New York Review of Books. A notable new departure since 1985 is his seminal work about the population genetic structure of bacteria. A 1993 paper on the subject, ‘How clonal are bacteria?’ [1Maynard-Smith J. et al.How clonal are bacteria?.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 1993; 90: 4384-4388Crossref PubMed Scopus (1478) Google Scholar] has been cited ∼300 times to date, and he is recognized as a pioneering figure in this important field. A new book, Animal Signals (co-authored with David Harper) [2Maynard-Smith J. Harper D. Animal Signals. Oxford University Press, 2003Crossref Google Scholar] revisiting pre-1985 interests recently received an excellent review in Science[3Stenseth N.C. Sætre G.-P. Why animals don't lie.Science. 2004; 304: 519-520Crossref Google Scholar]. Although justly proud of his earlier empirical work with Drosophila, JMS did not begin the career that made him famous until he was in his forties. The simple reason for this is that, understandably, it never occurred to him to pursue theoretical evolutionary questions with the towering figure of J.B.S. Haldane across the hall at University College London. Haldane, one of the great figures of 20th-century science, numbered among his many achievements the co-foundation of population genetics, which unified evolutionary theory with Mendelian genetics. So many were Haldane's achievements that, for the purposes of citation credit, JMS said of JBS that ‘if Haldane did it before, it does not count’ – otherwise how could anyone else have a career? It was only in the Sixties, after Haldane retired and moved to India, that JMS began his theoretical work. Haldane was the reason that JMS went to UCL, initially for an undergraduate degree in zoology and staying on as a lecturer. JMS had been to Eton, which considered the old-Etonian Haldane to be a ‘figure of immense wickedness’ but none-the-less kept his popular science books in the library. These, along with books by Eddington, Einstein, Huxley and H.G. Wells were the sole source of JMS' early science education. What was wicked about Haldane? He was a class traitor – a Communist! – and an atheist to boot. JMS joined the Communist Party himself in 1939. If Eton was not enough to turn him into a communist, his teenage eyes saw torch-lit Nazi parades: who could not be a communist at that time? JMS' family wanted him to enter his grandfather's firm of stockbrokers, but that was out of the question – he had to do science. All he knew of physics was the work of such geniuses as Einstein and Newton, and he did not feel up to that level. Engineering was the only science he thought one could make a living at, so engineering it was. Graduating from Cambridge he worked in aircraft design until he was 27 and decided to become an academic. His lifelong passion for animals led him to zoology and Haldane led him to UCL. One of his fellow undergraduates was Aubrey Manning, whom JMS credits with being quicker than him to realize the importance of the ideas of Tinbergen and Lorenz for the study of animal behaviour. By the time he started at UCL, JMS was becoming disillusioned with communism, although he did not leave the Party until 1956 when the Soviets invaded Hungary. This was because of the Lysenko affair: with Stalin's support, a group of biologists headed by Trofim Lysenko who believed in a fantasy ‘Marxist’ genetics with inheritance of acquired characteristics took over in the USSR, dismissing real genetics as ‘bourgeois’. By 1948, when JMS went to UCL, their ascendancy was complete. Haldane was remarkably reluctant to jettison his communist beliefs in the face of Lysenkoism, defending what was occurring in the USSR as just good, muscular, intellectual debate. This was unfortunate as many of Lysenko's opponents were shot – belief in Mendelism became lethal in the land of Stalin. Haldane – who had no scientific degree at all, having read ‘Greats’ at Oxford University – had a teaching style that was, by contemporary standards, unusual. Next to a passage in one of JMS' essays, Haldane wrote: ‘Pangloss’ Theorem’. To decipher this requires you to know or to learn that there is a character in Voltaire's novel Candide named Master Pangloss whose philosophy is that we live in the best of all possible worlds. With hindsight one could see in this brief comment from Haldane the germ of JMS' career. Although his subsequent interests in evolutionary biology were remarkably diverse, they have the common feature that they seem to present a puzzle from the individual-based survival-of-the-fittest view of natural selection, but seem to make perfect sense from the point of view of good-for-the-group group selectionism. Why does aging (senescence) occur? Why do so many species reproduce sexually? Why do individuals behave altruistically? Why do many animals settle conflicts without a fight? Why are animal communications honest? Before the 1960s, most biologists, if they thought about such questions at all, answered them with a glib and sterile ‘It's for the good of the species’ argument. It was the recognition that this would not do that led to decades of productive science with JMS at the centre. JMS also contributed to ecology studying, for example, the destabilising effects of time delays in population regulation and Robert May has described his models as ‘in some ways ahead of their time’: lavish praise – simpering, even – given the source. One of JMS' regrets was his failure to discover chaos. Reading the chapter about population regulation in his book Mathematical Ideas in Biology from 1968 [4Maynard-Smith J. Mathematical Ideas in Biology. Cambridge University Press, 1968Crossref Google Scholar] is like reading a modern exposition of a simple route to chaotic dynamics, but at the very moment that chaos is about to appear, the subject is closed with the phrase ‘divergent oscillations’. I is remarkable how modern his 1974 book Models in Ecology [5Maynard-Smith J. Models in Ecology. Cambridge University Press, 1975Google Scholar] looks today, and positively unnerving to see a spatially explicit metapopulation model of a predator–prey system with unstable local dynamics. Ahead of its time indeed: JMS' computer could only handle a 5×5 grid of cells. But, compared to his contributions to evolutionary biology JMS was a dabbler in ecology. This is because he felt ecology lacks the solid foundation that Mendel's Laws and natural selection provide evolutionary biology. This is a view shared by that other famous Marxist biologist, Richard Lewontin. Remarkably gregarious with boundless energy for discussing science, JMS will also be remembered for providing us with powerful theorems to be used in discussion when reason or reality are undermining our case (Box 1) . Aunt Jobiska's theorem, from Edward Lear: ‘It's a fact the whole world knows…[insert ‘fact’ here]’. The Bellman's theorem, from Lewis Carroll: ‘what I tell you three times is true’. If these fail, fall back on Jane Austen: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged…[insert ‘truth’ here].’Box 1. Origins of Maynard Smith's ’Theorems’The last stanza of Edward Lear's The Pobble Who Has No Toes:The Pobble who has no toesWas placed in a friendly Bark,And they rowed him back, and carried him upTo his Aunt Jobiska's Park.And she made him a feast at his earnest wishOf eggs and buttercups fried with fish,And she said “It's a fact the whole world knows,That Pobbles are happier without their toes!In Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman says:Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:That alone should encourage the crew.Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:What I tell you three times is true.The famous first line of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility reads:It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. The last stanza of Edward Lear's The Pobble Who Has No Toes: The Pobble who has no toes Was placed in a friendly Bark, And they rowed him back, and carried him up To his Aunt Jobiska's Park. And she made him a feast at his earnest wish Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish, And she said “It's a fact the whole world knows, That Pobbles are happier without their toes! In Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman says: Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true. The famous first line of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility reads: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. I will close with my favorite JMS story. One day, Haldane brought a visitor to JMS' lab and asked him to explain to the visitor the aerodynamic problem he was working on. JMS began going through the equations on the blackboard when the visitor's hand reached out, grabbed some chalk and started correcting the equations. JMS asked, ‘Sorry, I did not quite catch your name?’. The visitor answered, ‘Alan Turing’. Corrigendum et al.Trends in Ecology & EvolutionSeptember, 2004In Brief Full-Text PDF