Two “Times” obituaries for Robert Trivers

Reader Simon called my attention to a new obituary in the Times of London of Robert Trivers, a giant in evolutionary biology (and a notorious eccentric) who died on March 12.  Because his death wasn’t announced immediately after he expired, this was bit late, but better late than never—especially given Trivers’s importance in the field. It’s a good obituary but the gold standard was Steve Pinker’s “in memoriam” article about Trivers published in Quillette on March 25.

Click the screenshot below to read, and if that doesn’t work,the article is archived here.

An excerpt:

In a burst of creativity in the early 1970s, Robert Trivers published a series of scientific papers that earned him a claim to being among the most important evolutionary theorists since Darwin. He was the first to fully appreciate how a gene-centric view of natural selection could explain some of the most puzzling and fundamental patterns in social life: the function of altruism, why males and females differ so much, the underpinnings of sibling rivalry and the delicate dynamic of conflict and co-operation that exists between parent and child.

Brilliantly original, Trivers was also an academic misfit: a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking individualist with a notable tendency to get into violent scrapes and an ungovernable character that eventually strained his relationship with the academy to breaking point.

Why do we ever behave altruistically? That is, why would an organism ever promote the reproductive success of another at some cost to its own? Since the work of the great evolutionist WD Hamilton, it had been appreciated that “kin selection” could explain why close relatives help one another out: doing so promotes an organism’s “inclusive fitness”, a measure accounting not only for an organism’s own genes but for copies of the same genes likely to be present in relatives. But why help non-kin? To Trivers, it was an obvious fact of life that we sometimes give priority to friends, and even strangers, over direct relatives.

Persuaded of the misguidedness of “group selectionist” theories that were fashionable at the time — according to which organisms sometimes sacrifice themselves for the “good of the species” — Trivers gave the central explanatory role to the gene. In his landmark 1971 paper, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, Trivers argued that altruism depended on the possibility of reciprocity. As long as helping a non-relative is not too costly, and there is sufficient probability that the favour would one day be returned, genes coding for altruistic dispositions spread.

. . . Frustrated by the Harvard biology faculty’s delay in granting his tenure application in the late 1970s, he abruptly left with his young family to take up a position at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a decision he came to regard as a “once in a lifetime” mistake. There, he befriended Huey Newton, co-founder of the paramilitary Black Panther political party, who was a doctoral student at the university. They co-authored a paper on self-deception, and Trivers made Newton his daughter’s godfather. He joined the Panthers for a period and later confessed to doing “an illegal thing or two”, before Newton removed him from the group for his own safety.

In fact, what I recall in 1977 is that Harvard’s biology department recommended tenure for Trivers, but that recommendation was overturned by President Derek Bok.  I was there at the time and can vouch for that. Others say that Trivers asked for early tenure and was denied that, and then decided to leave Harvard. I also heard, and I can’t vouch for this, that Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) and Dick Levins, both Marxists who despised sociobiology, went to President Bok to lobby him to deny Trivers tenure.  What we do know is that Trivers then moved to Santa Cruz, and later to Rutgers, where his academic turmoil continued:

. . . In 2015 he was suspended by Rutgers University for refusing to teach a course on human aggression, a field he claimed he was not expert in (despite its being a personal forte of his). He quit university life for good shortly after. Later, he was among the set of high-profile intellectuals pilloried for maintaining financial and social links to Jeffrey Epstein, even after the latter’s conviction for sex offences. Far from apologetic, Trivers, who accepted funding from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability, vouched for his integrity; in Trivers’s view, Epstein’s imprisonment was punishment enough and his crimes less “heinous” than they were made out to be.

It is testament to the depth and generality of Trivers’s discoveries that they could be applied so readily, as he unsparingly conceded, to his own case. As he understood, natural selection has built us, and it is to natural selection we must return “to understand the many roots of our suffering”.

Compared to Pinker’s piece, the Times obituary is light on Trivers’s scientific accomplishments, but all in all it’s pretty good.

Below is a NYT obituary, also delayed, that appeared on March 27 (click to read or find it archived here):

An excerpt (David Haig, who’s quoted, has written his own remembrance of Trivers, as the two were good friends; but I don’t think it’s yet been published):

Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)

In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.

“I was an intellectual opportunist,” he wrote in “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” (2002). “The inability of biologists to think clearly on matters of social behavior and evolution for over a hundred years had left a series of important problems untackled.”

The paper does a decent job in outlining Trivers’s contributions, the most important of which was his evolutionary explanation of “reciprocal altruism”, but again, see Pinker for a fuller explication.  A bit more about the situation at Harvard:

“He could be a brilliant and wonderful colleague,” Professor Haig said. “In a different mood, he could be unnecessarily hostile to those around him.”

That’s enough for now, save one I just found in Skeptic, a remembrance by Trivers’s only graduate student ever, Robert Lynch. Click below to read:

It ends this way:

One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.”  That seems just about right to me.

His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him.

I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.