Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: Ranking with William D. Hamilton as one of the great creative geniuses of sociobiology, Trivers's roller-coaster career has been buffetted about by his manic-depression. He now appears to be on another upswing, and is getting a lot of media attention, although most of it so far has gingerly avoided touching upon his mental illnesses. A new article in The Guardian [via GNXP], fortunately, gives us more of his personality:

Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would...

During the second world war, Howard Trivers worked for the army, and produced the regulations for denazification: he was rewarded with a post in the state department, so Robert Trivers grew up in a diplomatic household, a handicap he has triumphantly overcome: his opponents at Harvard are described as fools, and he says Richard Lewontin, the intellectual leader of the campaigns against sociobiology, grossly underestimated the role that selection plays in the makeup of the genome, while sanctioning all sorts of slanders against his opponents. Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould's theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect ..."

In order to become a lawyer, he had to have a humanities degree, so his first studies at Harvard were in American history. They were interrupted by the first, and worst, of his breakdowns, which took the form of spiralling mania - staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and then collapsing. He was hospitalised, and treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs.

[Trivers's] mentor was an ornithologist called Bill Drury, whose memory he venerates... Drury became very close to his pupil and his trust was reciprocated: "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day, and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of 10 people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said 'Can I add three names to that list?'. That was his only comment." [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer