John Maynard Smith, the venerable and brilliant old biologist, has died at the age of 84. A protege of J.B.S. Haldane, Smith was an enormous influence over two entire generations of evolutionary biologists. He also published many popular books for non-scientists on evolutionary theory. Science, and the larger human community, has lost a giant.
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Evolgen has a has a nice little post poking fun at the late Ernst Mayr. A few comments.
1) R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and J.M. Smith were trained as mathematical/physical scientists before their biological days. Fisher did work in statistical mechanics before he went off to Rothamsted.…
In the comments below in regards to the great evolutionary biologists, and the "Top 10 list," I received some good submissions. But, there is definitely (in my mind) a top tier which I am inflexible about.
Darwin - he basically invented the field as a science, made some darn good predictions (H.…
So we're fusing two crappy mid-90s movies here -- Bio-Dome and Hot Shots! Part Deux -- but bear with me, this has nothing to do with the cinema. Inspired by Chad's attempt to come up with a Mount Rushmore for all of science, I decided to narrow the scope and create a Mount Biodome (limited to the…
Originally posted by Brian Switek
On February 22, 2009, at 6:18 PM
It would be fair to say that, until a week ago, I knew virtually nothing about J.B.S. Haldane. I knew he was a British biologist who helped form the subdiscipline of population genetics, but that was about it. Then, unexpectedly,…