John Maynard Smith on reductive vs effective thinking about evolution

“The logic of animal conflict” — a 1973 paper by Maynard Smith and Price — is usually taken as the starting for evolutionary game theory. And as far as I am an evolutionary game theorists, it influences my thinking. Most recently, this thinking has led me to the conclusion that there are two difference conceptions of evolutionary games possible: reductive vs. effective. However, I don’t think that this would have come as much of a surprise to Maynard Smith and Price. In fact, the two men embodied the two different ways of thinking that underlay my two interpretations.

I was recently reminded of this when Aakash Pandey shared a Web of Stories interview with John Maynard Smith. This is a 4 minute snippet of a long interview with Maynard Smith. In the snippet, he starts with a discussion of the Price equation (or Price’s theorem, if you want to have that debate) but quickly digresses to a discussion of the two kinds of mathematical theories that can be made in science. He identifies himself with the reductive view and Price with the effective. I recommend watching the whole video, although I’ll quote relavent passages below.

In this post, I’ll present Maynard Smith’s distinction on the two types of thinking in evolutionary models. But I will do this in my own terminology to stress the connections to my recent work on evolutionary games. However, I don’t think this distinction is limited to evolutionary game theory. As Maynard Smith suggests in the video, it extends to all of evolutionary biology and maybe scientific modelling more generally.