This book describes the confirmation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as well as the modifications it has undergone through recent research and observations.
Among its chapters are those dealing with the origin of life and its earliest stages of evolution, molecular evolution, the origin of species, and other related topics.
John Maynard Smith was born in 1920. Although he did not grow up in a scientific environment, his surroundings offered him ample opportunities to observe the behavior of a wide variety of animals. In 1941, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Cambridge, and for the following six years worked in an aircraft design office.
Finding aircraft to be both noisy and technologically outdated, however, he enrolled at University College London, where he worked under the supervision of J.B.S. Haldane, studying the genetics, physiology, and behavior of the fruit fly Drosophila subobscura. In 1965, he became the founding Dean of Biology at the newly established University of Sussex.
His interest in evolution began while he was still a schoolboy, prompted by the theory’s religious and philosophical implications. His later research focused on the evolution of sex and altruistic behavior, as well as the relationship between evolution and ecology.