Robert Trivers | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Ludlow Trivers (1943-02-19)February 19, 1943 (age 82) Washington, D.C., United States |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Known for | Evolution of social behavior |
| Spouses |
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| Children | 5 |
| Awards | Crafoord Prize (2007) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biology |
| Institutions | Rutgers University |
| Thesis | Natural Selection and Social Behavior (1972) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ernest Williams[1] |
| Website | roberttrivers |
Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers (/ˈtrɪvərz/; born February 19, 1943) is an Americanevolutionary biologist andsociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories ofreciprocal altruism (1971),parental investment (1972), facultativesex ratio determination (1973), andparent–offspring conflict (1974). He has also contributed by explainingself-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy (first described in 1976) and discussingintragenomic conflict.[2]
Trivers studied evolutionary theory withErnst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, when he earned hisPhD inbiology.[3] At Harvard he published a series of some of the most influential and highly cited papers in evolutionary biology. His first major paper as a graduate student was "The evolution of reciprocal altruism", published in 1971.[4] In this paper Trivers offers a solution to the longstanding problem of cooperation among unrelated individuals and by doing so overcame a crucial problem for how to police the system by proposing how natural selection could evolve ways to detect cheaters. His next major work, "Parental investment and sexual selection", was published the following year. Here Trivers proposed a general framework for understanding sexual selection that had eluded evolutionary thinkers sinceCharles Darwin. Arguably his most important paper, it arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third floor apartment inCambridge, Massachusetts, and by his reading a 1948 paper byAngus Bateman (“Intra-sexual selection inDrosophila”) which demonstrated that sex differences in the intensity of selection in fruit flies were based on their ability to obtain mates.[5] The primary insight of Trivers was that the key variable underlying the evolution of sex differences across species was relative parental investment in offspring.
Trivers was on the faculty atHarvard University from 1973 to 1978, and then moved to theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz where he was a faculty member 1978 to 1994. He is aRutgers University faculty member. In the 2008–09 academic year, he was a Fellow at theBerlin Institute for Advanced Study.[6]
Trivers was awarded the 2007Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".[7][8]
Trivers metHuey P. Newton, Chairman of theBlack Panther Party, in 1978 when Newton applied while in prison to do a reading course with Trivers as part of a graduate degree inHistory of Consciousness atUC Santa Cruz.[9] Trivers and Newton became close friends: Newton was godfather to one of Trivers's daughters.[10] Trivers joined the Black Panther Party in 1979.[11] He and Newton published an analysis of the role ofself-deception by the flight crew in the crash ofAir Florida Flight 90.[12] Trivers was "ex-communicated" from the Panthers by Newton in 1982 for "his own good."[13]
In 2015, Rutgers University suspended Trivers with pay as part of an ongoing dispute regarding a class on "Human Aggression" the Anthropology department had assigned to him. Trivers said that he was told to teach the class even though he objected that he knew nothing about the specific subject. In his first lecture, Trivers told the class he would do his best to learn the subject along with them and with the help of guest lecturers. Rutgers suspended Trivers for involving the students in the controversy. Trivers told the Rutgers campus newsletter that Rutgers's officials refused to meet with him. Trivers also told the student paper: "You would think the university would show a little respect for my teaching abilities on subjects that I know about and not force me to teach a course on a subject that I do not at all master."[14] Trivers has had a contentious few years at Rutgers.[15]
Trivers is among the most influentialevolutionary theorists alive today.[16]Steven Pinker considers Trivers to be "one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought", who has:[17]
...inspired an astonishing amount of research and commentary in psychology and biology—the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian social science, and behavioral ecology are in large part attempt to test and flesh out Trivers's ideas. It is no coincidence thatE. O. Wilson'sSociobiology andRichard Dawkins'The Selfish Gene were published in 1975 and 1976 respectively, just a few years after Trivers's seminal papers. Both bestselling authors openly acknowledged that they were popularizing Trivers's ideas and the research they spawned. Likewise for the much-talked-about books on evolutionary psychology in the 1990s—The Adapted Mind,The Red Queen,Born to Rebel,The Origins of Virtue,The Moral Animal, and my ownHow the Mind Works. Each of these books is based in large part on Trivers's ideas and the explosion of research they inspired, involving dozens of animal species, mathematical and computer modeling, and human social and cognitive psychology.
Trivers has two Jamaican ex-wives, five children, and eight grandchildren as of 2016.[18]
Trivers believes that girls mature earlier than in the past. He writes “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago".[19]
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