John Maynard Smith

“You couldn't have human society without language.”

“Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.”

“The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.”

“Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.”

“Societies depend on agreed rules.”

“I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.”

“There is no theoretical reason to expect evolutionary lineages to increase in complexity with time, and no empirical evidence that they do so. Nevertheless, eukaryotic cells are more complex than prokaryotic ones, animals and plants are more complex than protists, and so on. This increase in complexity may have been achieved as a result of a series of major evolutionary transitions. These involved changes in the way information is stored and transmitted.[The major evolutionary transitions, Nature 374, 227 - 232 (16 March 1994)]”

“Language changes very fast.”