Robert Trivers: the last wild man of academia He wouldn’t stand a chance today

According to a popular declinist view, university life is witnessing a slow extinction event: the eradication from the ecosystem of a distinctive kind of headstrong and troublesome, though occasionally brilliant, male academic. If that’s right, then a notable act of natural selection took place last month with the death, aged 83, of the American theoretical biologist Robert Trivers. Trivers was, in the estimation of his peers (and, candidly, of himself), among the one or two greatest evolutionary theorists since Charles Darwin. According to Steven Pinker, he was one of “the great thinkers in the history of Western thought”; in E.O. Wilson’s view, he was one of “the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time”. Trivers’s customary way of returning such praise was to label Wilson’s self-appointment as the father of sociobiology “bullshit” and to openly regard his most famous colleague at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, as “something of an intellectual fraud”.

Though extraordinary, Trivers was also extraordinarily difficult. He was impulsive, often rude, drug-abusing, and temperamentally allergic to the kind of niceties that structure today’s academic environment. While his early work as a graduate student at Harvard saw an unprecedented burst of creativity, subsequent years were occasionally derailed by bouts of “serious drinking” and “much more THC than was strictly consistent with forward progress on any subject”. He had a remarkable capacity to be drawn into confrontation, both the productive scholarly combat increasingly discouraged in some departments and the more hand-to-hand, life-threatening kind. He was constantly getting held up at knife- and gunpoint in brothels, or else thrown into jail overnight. His 2015 memoir, Wild Life, is somewhat cursory about the evolutionary research programmes he helped found, and more concerned with recounting vignettes from his reprobate lifestyle. “I have ‘enjoyed’, as he puts it, “an unusual number of near-death experiences — due in part to my tendency towards intense interpersonal disagreements late at night”.

Wild Life is full of the kind of useful know-how all too rarely imparted in the sheltered environment of higher education. How should you deal with a thick-set male who has forced you into defending a woman’s honour? Trivers’s answer is four or five “very rapid left jabs, the key punch in keeping a beast at bay. You can finish your attacker off later, if you are lucky, with a right cross, but in the meantime it’s jab, jab, jab, jab, right in his face”. How should one fend off a wild dog when armed with a gun? Don’t try to take it out at a distance, Trivers warns: hold your nerve till it’s close enough to wrap its jaws around your leg, then put a bullet through its head.

Trivers’s memoir is full of the sort of throwaway lines and disorientating opening gambits one seldom encounters in the autobiography of a tenured academic. “For this account, I have simply gone through my arrests in the order in which they occurred”; “Having just laid on my back and chug-a-lugged Jim Beam bourbon in front of everyone…’ ; “I was arrested for driving under the influence in California, and they were dead right”; and so on.

Later in Trivers’s career, one of his graduate students recalls inquiring about a recent wound on his hand. Trivers explained blandly that he had recently survived an armed home invasion at his house in Jamaica; word of his receipt of the Crafoord Prize — the equivalent of the Nobel in biological sciences, worth half a million dollars — had got round town, he suspected. Arriving home one evening, Trivers noticed two shadowy figures emerging from the darkness. “Had I forgotten an appointment, as I often do? No — since when was I meeting with two butt-ugly young men in my bedroom at ten-thirty at night”. That terrifying set-up develops into a quintessentially Trivers-style tale of disorderly derring-do. Having escaped his attackers by leaping from a second-floor window, Trivers stabbed one of his assailants with a six-inch blade he kept on his person for just such occasions: “I cut the shorter one across his throat as he leaned over to attack me – alas not deeply enough to kill him”. At the time, he was 67.

The way Trivers’s ungovernable temperament interacted with the rarefied status of a distinguished academic was more than a passing note of comic incongruity in his life. His theoretical contributions, too, were outputs of the very same unflinchingly direct and bloody-minded disposition that continually got him into scrapes. Trivers had no patience for the mawkish instinct to regard mankind as elevated or special, somehow an exception to the Darwinian framework. Such thinking was mistaken twice over: naively dismissive of non-human animals, and complacently self-important about the human animal. He used the word “organism” of others as a term of endearment, and continually saw his own impulses reflected back at him in the animal life he studied.

His unsentimental eye enabled him to see the theoretical fruit in applying a gene-centred view of natural selection to human social life. Thoroughly repelled by the amorphous “group selectionist” theories still in vogue in the Seventies (according to which, by some obscure mechanism, individual organisms sometimes “sacrificed” themselves for the good of the species), Trivers’s first revolutionary paper attempted to spell out the genetic basis for altruistic behaviour. There, Trivers developed the foundation laid by W.D. Hamilton, showing that altruistic traits could be selected for — so long as the costs of helping another remained comparatively low and the chance of future reciprocity remained high enough. On Trivers’s model, moral emotions, like gratitude, an instinct for fairness, and an urge for revenge, were predictable upshots too: dispositions necessary to police the subversive behaviour of those who attempt to free-ride on the good deeds of others. Colleagues joked that the tit-for-tat, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, logic (shortly to be popularised in The Selfish Gene) came naturally to Trivers, being not too far off the way he instinctively perceived human social interaction. (“If you say something insulting”, he reflected, “I want to strike right back”).

Trivers had a bracing ability to detect the bestial side of human life and the human-like intricacies of animal life. He saw, for instance, how the diverging genetic interests of siblings and parents necessarily led to a standing conflict of interest in which offspring are always disposed to extract more than an equal share of communal resources and parents always disposed to try to stop them. Cuteness, tantrums, post-partum depression, rebelliousness, and sibling rivalry for parental attention are conjectured to be some of the many weapons in that battle between parent and child in which each attempts to impose its will on the other.

Another groundbreaking paper came about when Trivers made a study of pigeons jockeying for position among their female partners just outside his apartment window at Harvard. He recognised what was already familiar to him: the undisguised evidence of male sexual jealousy. (“It became clear that pigeons suffered from the same kinds of psycho-sexual behaviours and feelings we did”). While the male pigeons would possessively guard their females from the romantic attention of competitors, males themselves would take every opportunity to cuckold a rival, often while their partner looked tolerantly askance.

What explains the dramatic divergence between the physiological and psychological make-up of the sexes? Trivers’s hypothesis was that sex differences could be traced to the differential parental investment made by each sex in producing offspring. Take the human case: while a man’s contribution to reproduction is often over in a depressingly short time, the woman is left for nine months to bring a three-kilogram baby to term. That fact sends the sexes down diverging physiological and psychological pathways. Roughly: the female becomes pickier, while the male becomes more prone to infidelity, jealousy and sustained competition for sexual opportunities. In showing that a sound, elegant, evolutionary logic underpinned the dynamics of the human sexual market-place, Trivers bequeathed the respectable intellectual backdrop onto which the pseudoscience of the contemporary manosphere is projected. Trivers would presumably have held in contempt the twisted misogyny and glaring self-deception of those male influencers who appropriate a Darwinian idiom. Still, it is difficult to avoid concluding that his own stereotypically blunt and psychologically self-knowing method enabled Trivers more easily to reach the insights he did. How many researchers would so readily see their own psychology reflected in the sexual jealousy of a pigeon?

The unvoiced question that hangs over Wild Life is whether a man of Trivers’s combination of ability and rebarbative personality would be enabled to flourish in the academic world of today. One telling data-point is provided by the dismaying cul-de-sacs Trivers’s own career occasionally turned into. Even after his discipline-shaping work, much of it done as a graduate student with little formal training in biology, Harvard demurred and delayed over his tenure application; Trivers’s response was to impulsively up sticks to California, something he came to regard as a “once-in-a-lifetime” mistake. At the end of his career in 2015, notwithstanding his intellectual renown, he was suspended and eventually quit Rutgers University, having kicked up a fuss about being made to teach an introductory course on the nature of human aggression, something which he claimed not to be sufficiently expert in (hardly plausible when you consider his personal track record).

Jeffrey Epstein then gave Trivers $40,000 to continue his research into the connection between human knee symmetry and sprinting ability. Entirely predictably, Trivers then became one of the coterie of elite academics, alongside the likes of Larry Summers and Noam Chomsky, to be smeared for their association with Epstein. Even here, Trivers, who remained convivial with Epstein into the mid-2010s, distinguished himself by his sheer incapacity to play along with the media’s moralistic ritual of extracting a performance of contrition from their prey (“he gives me consistent, warm support without me having to write endless applications for grants”, he said matter-of-factly, while provocatively wondering aloud whether Epstein’s crimes were really so “heinous”).

Would a Trivers-like figure just starting out survive in an academic climate that places an ever higher premium on conformity over individual brilliance? Men of Trivers’s cast of mind are often shunned for their morbid style of thought. In his twenties, Trivers, who suffered from episodes of serious mental ill-health, confided in his mentor William Drury that during his most recent breakdown he had resolved to kill himself if he ever felt another coming on; but now, he added, he had refined his plan: he had a list of 10 people he would take down first before dying “in the counter-attack”. Drury’s charming response was to pause a moment and then ask whether he could add three or so additional names to Trivers’s list. Would such a macabre exchange fly now? More likely, it would set in train a complex disciplinary process and expedited referral to Prevent. Yet more disqualifying, of course, would be Trivers’s uncrushable dislike of authority and native intolerance for the kid-glove discursive norms that are now treated as non-negotiable in many universities.

Implicit in much thinking within the academy, in its present “woke” phase, is the assumption that research should be an emollient process of mutual cooperation rather than a productive, potentially offence-giving, clash of competing outlooks. But as Trivers saw all too keenly, social relations that seem on their face harmonious — those between man and woman, parent and child, friend and neighbour — invariably conceal a suppressed dynamic of conflict. In the university’s case, the passive-aggression with which progressive ideals are enforced conceals the exclusionary pressure that can be directed at troublesome outsiders like Robert Trivers. All too often, such figures must either concede defeat and become domesticated by the system — or else be expelled, whatever intellectual gifts they have to give. In effect, these individuals are dubiously sacrificed for the good of the species, the mechanism by which this is supposed to do any good only ever opaquely spelt out. That, as Trivers knew, is a bad idea.

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