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Sharp Insights and a Sharp Tongue
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Brilliant but troubled, Robert Trivers made his mark dissecting the evolution of
human relationships. In a new book, he tackles deceit and self-deception
Mention the name Robert Trivers to those
in the know, and the reaction you get is awe.
Harvard University psychologist Steven
Pinker calls him “one of the great thinkers
in the history of Western thought.” Stuart
West, a professor of evolutionary biology at
the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, recently described him as “one of the
most influential evolutionary biologists since
Charles Darwin.” And in 1999, Time named
him one of the 20th century’s 100 greatest
thinkers and scientists. Yet most biology students do not even know the name.
In the 1970s, Trivers penned a series of
landmark papers that have been cited thousands of times and opened up the study of
human relationships to biology. Looking in
turn at interactions between friends, then lovers, then parent and child, he helped to lay the
foundations for sociobiology, or a “Darwinian social theory,” as he called it. Then he disappeared from view, only to reemerge in the
1990s with a remarkable second career that
has also led to his latest effort: a book called
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and
Self-Deception in Human Life that might well
introduce him to a larger audience.
The person who has led this remarkable
life is a man of 68 years, with a deep voice
and an infectious laugh. He has recently had
his hip replaced and does some leg exercises
while being interviewed. Trivers likes to make
fun of the fact that he has grown old. “Did you
know that the enjoyment of sex is actually correlated with sperm count in the ejaculate?” he
asks. “So it is true that in old age you appreciate the smaller things more. There are no big
things to enjoy anymore.” But he also brags
about his beautiful new black leather coat and
has the air of a young man more interested in
wine and women than lectures.
Trivers followed a winding road to biology.
He was interested in pure mathematics first,
having taught himself differential and integral
calculus when he was 14. But by 18 he had
lost interest and wanted to become a lawyer.
“I wanted to fight for justice, for the poor, and
against racial discrimination,” he says without
a trace of irony. Indeed, one of his most vivid
memories of childhood is his mother coming
to the dinner table in tears, because a white
police officer in Washington, D.C., had shot
to death a 14-year-old black child for jaywalking. “Growing up in Maryland, it was very
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PROFILE: ROBERT TRIVERS
obvious to me that black
people were living a very
oppressed life,” he says.
But at age 21, studying
history as an undergraduate at Harvard, Trivers
suffered a mental breakdown. He would stay up
all night, reading the 20th
century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was
convinced that he had
insights into Wittgenstein’s
ideas that no one else had.
Trivers wound up spending 3 months in a hospital.
Such breakdowns would
recur throughout his life
and cause him immense
suffering, but Trivers calls
that first one the most painful: “In the beginning, I did
not know who or what I
was.” When he got back on
his feet, he applied to law
school but decided against
it when the schools wanted a copy of his
medical records.
After Trivers started to work for a company illustrating and then writing schoolbooks for fifth-graders, he discovered the
beauty of evolution. “Three billion years of
the history of life, it is such a magnificent
view,” he says. So at age 24, Trivers went
back to Harvard to study biology not knowing anything at all about animals. He even
claims that fellow students showed him pictures of a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus and
asked him which is which. “I had a 50-50
chance, and I still chose wrong.”
Seeing life as conflict
Nonetheless, Trivers turned out to be an
immensely original thinker in biology. His
strength has been to see conflict where
other people see only harmony. In the baby
growing in a womb, he saw a struggle for
resources between mother and child. In the
romantic love between a man and a woman,
he saw a pair eternally at odds because of
their differential investment in their offspring. Whereas others see optimism and
self-deception as a defensive strategy to stay
sane and happy in a harsh world, he sees it as
a psychological attack mechanism, “fooling
yourself to better fool others,” he says.
Conflict has been a recurring theme not
only in Trivers’s work but also in his life.
Stories of his reckless and aggressive side
abound. He loves to use the words “fuck”
and “motherfucker,” calling them quite use-
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ful, and he has gotten into public
Trivers had figured out that
spats with many people over the
the difference in parental investyears. Trivers can be brutally honment is the most important difest and plain rude, as many letters
ference between the sexes, one
he has written to colleagues over
from which all else springs.
the years testify. True to form, in
While the human male conhis new book, Trivers is scathtributes only a sperm that he
ing of NASA and U.S. foreign
can produce millions of, the
policy, derides Turkey’s denial
female invests in a 9-month
of an Armenian genocide, and
pregnancy producing a 3-kiloargues that the genocide perpegram baby. Naturally, Trivers
trated by Nazi Germany on Euroargued, her strategy for choospean Jews was far from unique.
ing a partner had to be different
“The notion of the holocaust has
from that of the male, leading
spurred the growth of an industo a difference in psychology.
try designed to extract long-ago
Females are pickier and focus
costs of this event, which flow not
on a male’s genetic quality, stato the camp survivors but to their
tus, and his willingness to invest
distant cousins, usually nowhere Period piece. Robert Trivers (left) with Black Panther co-founder Huey in the offspring. Males compete
near the camps, while serving to Newton (center) and another friend, Jay Friedheim (right), during Trivers’s for women and focus on physijustify Israel’s frequent attacks “fallow” years in California.
cal evidence of fertility, among
on its Arab neighbors,” he writes.
other attributes.
Asked whether his discussion of Middle Harvard biomathematician Martin Nowak.
For nights after this insight, Trivers
East politics might not turn off some people And the implications were stunning. “Recip- remembers dreaming of a long corridor
whom he might otherwise convince of his rocal altruism led to cheating, that led to with two animals of each kind in it. Then
ideas, he just says, “Well, fuck ’em.”
defense against cheating, and that led to the in response to an unknown signal, each
Ironically, Trivers’s first contribution to evolution of a sense of fairness, friendship, pair separated, males heading for a door on
biology was on cooperation. Evolutionary and trust,” Trivers says.
one side, females heading for another door
biologist William Donald Hamilton had first
on the other. “It felt symbolic of what I had
proposed in the 1960s that helping a relative Friends, lovers, and children
achieved,” he says.
even at a cost to oneself could be advanta- Most biologists spend their lives studying
Having dissected friendship and love in
geous in evolutionary terms because relatives ants, geese, or other animals and then extend quick succession, publishing key papers in
share many of one’s genes. Survival in the their conclusions to humans later in life. 1971 and 1972, Trivers turned in 1974 to the
long term boils down to being successful at Trivers tended to start with humans. “Some of relationship of parents and offspring. “There
passing on one’s genes. Thus, in Hamilton’s his creativity is to look at himself to under- was all this nonsense at the time about parview, a gene that would make an animal sac- stand. So a lot of Robert’s papers say a lot ents teaching their children language and
rifice itself to save three of its siblings would about himself,” says Harvard biologist David culture in a completely disinterested fashoutcompete other genes. Because each sib- Haig, one of Trivers’s closest friends. Indeed, ion and the child just being a vessel that they
ling has a 50% chance of carrying this gene Haig says, Trivers was predestined to write the were filling,” he scoffs. In fact, there was
for family love, it would in effect be sacrificing just one copy of itself to save 1.5 copies of itself, a smart choice. Similar logic
I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Kinship is obviously important, but
applies to more distantly related relatives
such as cousins, but more of them would
friends can actually be more important.
have to be saved—the number dependent on
their degrees of relatedness—to make the
sacrifice worthwhile.
paper on reciprocal altruism, because it is so a battle for resources that started with the
Based on his own life experiences, close to how he himself behaves, being nice if fetus growing in the mother’s body. “Later,
Trivers realized that this nepotistic altruism someone is nice to him first. “Robert likes his the mother wants to cut down on the milk so
could not be the whole story. “I thought, ‘Wait reciprocal altruism up front,” he jokes.
she can have her next offspring, but the child
a minute. Kinship is obviously important, but
Then, Trivers turned from friends to lov- wants to keep suckling, so there is weaning
friends can actually be more important,’ ” he ers. Observing male pigeons hustling females conflict,” he explains. Trivers termed this
says. In 1971, he published a paper describ- while their own partners were caring for parent-offspring conflict.
ing the idea of reciprocal altruism. Helping a the eggs in the nest, but getting agitated as
As with his other insights, he did not
nonrelative could also be beneficial, Trivers soon as another male approached its mate, elaborate on the principle. “He is interested
argued, if it did not cost too much and if there Trivers felt reminded of human double stan- in the big picture rather than fussing around
was a likelihood that the two would meet dards in regard to sexual relationships. He with the details,” says Haig, who adds that
again and the other person would then recip- spent 9 months collecting 70 relevant papers, it is hard to find a similarly productive
rocate. “Like all great ideas in science, in which he read over the course of three intense period in evolutionary theory. “Each of
retrospect it seems intuitive and obvious, but days holed up in his apartment. “Then I wrote those papers founded a new field of research.
at the time it was immensely original,” says the paper, working 24/7 for a month,” he says. It is incredible.”
“
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ish genetic elements. By then, Trivers’s theories on parent-offspring conflict had been
spectacularly confirmed by the discovery of
imprinted genes, like Igf2, in which just one
copy of a gene is active, not the usual two
(Science, 25 September 1998, p. 1984). The
Igf2 protein makes the fetus in the womb
grow faster. The mother inactivates the gene
in the egg to rein in growth, trying to sequester some of her resources for future pregnancies. But the father’s copy is still going strong,
making the fetus grow as much as it can.
The book Genes in Conflict was published in 2006 to great academic acclaim.
A year later, Trivers received the Crafoord
Prize. One of biology’s most prestigious
prizes, it was established by the Swedish
“
I’ve spent almost a year of my life locked up, usually in mental
institutions, sometimes in police stations, sometimes both.
him, it was because of his bipolar disorder. “I
had by then had three breakdowns, one as a
faculty member,” he says.
Many myths revolve around why Trivers
did not get early tenure. Some think he got
caught up in the war over sociobiology that
had erupted on the campus after E. O. Wilson
published his book with that title. Harvard
scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Lewontin saw Trivers’s and Wilson’s
work trying to explain human relationships
in evolutionary terms as a theory with no
scientific support. Sociobiology was aimed
at defending the “status quo as an inevitable
consequence of ‘human nature,’ ” they wrote
in a letter to The New York Review of Books.
“I have heard stories according to which
Robert got done in by pretty much everyone here. They cannot all be true,” Haig says.
“Well, I guess they could.”
In the end, Trivers decided to take an offer
from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He started teaching there in 1978, befriended
Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, wrote a textbook on social evolution that he says was ahead of its time but
never sold well, and largely disappeared from
view. Harvard anthropologist Irven DeVore
calls it Trivers’s “fallow” period.
In the 1990s, Trivers resurfaced on the
East Coast. He joined the faculty of Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey,
partly to be closer to his children. And he
started to turn toward conflict again, professionally as well as privately. Together with
Austin Burt, a geneticist at Imperial College
London, he began working on a book on self-
”
industrialist Holger Crafoord, who commercialized artificial kidneys, and presented
to Trivers by the queen of Sweden. At the
official banquet, Trivers gave a “shout-out”
to everyone who had only one kidney “for
making this award possible.”
But the honor didn’t mellow the man.
Trivers is in the middle of a dispute with
William Brown, now at the University of Bedfordshire in the United Kingdom, with whom
he published a paper on symmetry and dance
in Nature in 2005. The paper appears to show
that men and women with more symmetric
bodies are also better dancers, with dancing thus being a possible indicator of genetic
quality. But Trivers has accused Brown, who
he says was in charge of the statistics, of
preselecting the dancers and changing the
values on some of the dancers’ measures of
symmetry to get that result. Trivers has even
written a short book about it that he sends to
whoever cites the paper. Brown will only say
that Rutgers is investigating the matter, and
Nature has no comment.
Conflicts have not slowed Trivers down,
however. At Rutgers, he resumed work on a
long-gestating project, the book on self-deception that he had started writing with Huey
Newton in the 1980s. (Its central hypothesis is
that our ability to deceive ourselves evolved in
order to deceive others.) Trivers calls Newton,
who was shot and killed in 1989, a master in
three out of four aspects of deception and selfdeception: “He was a master at propagating
deception. He was a master at seeing through
your deception. He was a master at beating
your self-deception out of you. And like all the
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rest of us, he fell down when it came to seeing
through his own self-deception.” Trivers has
dedicated the book to Newton.
A difficult mind
Much of Trivers’s life has been overshadowed
by his struggle with bipolar disorder. (It was
his mentor, the famous biologist Ernst Mayr,
who realized that a first diagnosis of schizophrenia was wrong.) “I’ve spent almost a year
of my life locked up, usually in mental institutions, sometimes in police stations, sometimes both,” Trivers says. Only once, during
his second breakdown, did he feel the disease actually spurred some creative thinking.
That was in 1972 on a trip to East Africa.
Trivers was losing sleep, thinking about parentoffspring conflict, when it suddenly occurred
to him that the conflict extended far beyond
fighting over milk. There was also a conflict
over how the child should behave. “Because
I share only half my genes with my brother, I
am selected to transfer benefit to him only if
that benefit is twice as big as the cost to me.
But my mother is equally related to the two of
us, so she wants to encourage me to help my
brother whenever the benefit is greater than
the cost. So there is real psychological conflict
built into the parent-offspring relationship.
That was a revelation to me.”
But that insight had its cost. After returning to the United States, Trivers was hospitalized for 10 days before he could return to
work. “After that, the breakdowns were uniformly bad,” he says.
Trivers’s life has not been easy, and he has
sometimes made life hard for those around
him. “Over the years, I’ve seen the periods
of psychotic mania and depression. In those
periods, he can become more difficult to deal
with, and I’ve learned to weather that,” says
Haig, who says Trivers is the most unusual
scientist he knows. Nowak agrees: “Meeting
Robert is never an everyday encounter.”
Nor has Trivers ever been an everyday
biologist. His latest theory on self-deception
is sure to ruffle some feathers, and University of Chicago zoologist Jerry Coyne says
the book suffers from a lack of tangible zoological examples. “But Trivers’s forte has
never been to show what has happened but
what could happen,” he says. He calls Trivers
“one of those thinkers whose importance
rests on inspiring a generation of researchers.” There is a contradiction at the heart of
his life and his work. Trivers might be a difficult character, and his life might have been
rough at times, but his big ideas have always
been simple and elegant.
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Disappearing act
But fame and fortune didn’t follow Trivers
the way they favored others. Oxford’s Richard
Dawkins started his road to stardom with The
Selfish Gene, a book greatly influenced by
Trivers’s ideas. (Look up Trivers in the index,
and you will find him referenced on 30 pages,
roughly a tenth of the book.) Trivers, meanwhile, felt underpaid at Harvard. The year
was 1978. “I was earning only $14,000 a year
then,” Trivers says. At the time, his wife was
pregnant with twins. “I was teaching about
reproductive success, and the university was
not paying me enough to have any of my
own,” he says. When Trivers applied for early
tenure at Harvard, the university decided to
delay the decision for 3 years. According to
–KAI KUPFERSCHMIDT
Kai Kupferschmidt is a science writer in Berlin.
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