John Maynard Smith has died.

While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, I’d bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. That’s a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science‘s online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.)

Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the mathematical underpinnings of things, whether they are bridges or botflies. (An awful