Robert Trivers
Robert L. Trivers (born February 19, 1943, pronounced /ˈtrɪvɚz/) is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). Other areas in which he has made influential contributions include an adaptive view of self-deception (first described in 1976) and intragenomic conflict. Along with George C. Williams, Trivers is arguably one of the most influential evolutionary theorists alive today. A 1961 graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, Trivers went to Harvard to study mathematics, but wound up studying U.S. history in preparation to become a lawyer. He received his A.B. degree in History on June 16, 1965 from Harvard University. He took a psychology class after suffering a breakdown, and was very unimpressed with the state of psychology. He was prevented from getting into Yale law school by his breakdown, and wound up with a job writing social science textbooks for children (never published, due in part to presenting evolution by natural selection as fact). This exposure to evolutionary theory led him to do graduate work with Ernst Mayr at Harvard 1968-1972. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology on June 15, 1972 also from Harvard University. He was on faculty at Harvard 1973-1978, then moved to UC Santa Cruz. He met Huey P. Newton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in 1978 when Newton applied (while in prison) to do a reading course with him as part of a graduate degree in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Trivers and Newton became close friends: Newton was even godfather to one of Trivers' daughters. Trivers joined the Black Panther Party in 1979. Trivers and Newton published an analysis of the role of self-deception by the flight crew in the crash of Air Florida Flight 90. Trivers was a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz 1978-1994. He is currently a Rutgers University notable faculty member. In the 2008-2009 academic year, he is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). He wrote the original foreword to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and was recently awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation". —— From Wikipedia
7 Books Written
Robert Trivers is a pioneering figure in the field of sociobiology. For Natural Selection and Social Theory, he has selected eleven of his most influential papers, including several classic papers from the early 1970s on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflicts, and asymmetry in sexual selection, which helped to establish the centrality of sociobiology, as well as
Pp. xviii, 462; 200+ black-and-white photos and line-drawings. Original color pictorial stiff wrappers, sm 4to. Social Evolution offers a clear and up-to-date introduction to the growing field of sociobiology. The book emphasizes topics especially relevant to human behavior, including kindship, parent-offspring relations, parental investment, sexual selection, mate choice, cooperation, and deceit
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
by Robert Trivers
Rating: 3.6 ⭐
Whether it’s in a cockpit at takeoff or the planning of an offensive war, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office, there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive—but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead to disaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we deceive?In hi
Robert Trivers is a living legend in biology and the social sciences, a man the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls ''one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought" and Time magazine named one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th Century. His theories on the evolutionary tensions between parent and offspring, sibling and sibling, man and woman, friend and friend,
A thorough reanalysis of Brown et al. (2005) “Dance reveals symmetry especially in young men” shows that all of the major results appear to be based on hidden procedures designed to produce the results later derived. These procedures include the pre-selection of animations of Jamaicans dancing, apparently based on preliminary evaluation in New Jersey, so as to exclude symmetrical individuals who d
