Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers was born in Washington D.C. on February 19, 1943, the son of Mildred Trivers^[2] and Howard Trivers. His father was an American academic and US State Department diplomat who played a key role in the denazification of post-war Germany, taking part in negotiations at the Potsdam Conference, 1947 Moscow Conference, and the 1949 Paris Conference, later involved in developing US policy related to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.^[5][6][7] Growing up in a diplomatic household, Robert Trivers attended schools in Berlin, Copenhagen and Washington D.C, before attending Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and going on to study American History at Harvard.^[7][8]

Trivers was open about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which was first diagnosed when he had a manic episode at Harvard, requiring hospitalisation for several months and treatment with first generation antipsychotics.^[6][8] During his recovery he developed an interest in psychology and social biology, although initially chose not to pursue this, applying to law school at Harvard and Yale; he was rejected from both, in part due to his mental health.^[6][8][8] Trivers spent around 13 years living on and off in Jamaica, and has been married twice to Jamaican women.^[6] He has 4 children with his first wife, Lorna Stable, and one with his second wife, Debra Dixon. As of 2016 he had eight grandchildren.^[8]

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 Trivers as part of a graduate degree in History of Consciousness at UC 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 of self-deception by the flight crew in the crash of Air Florida Flight 90.^[12] Trivers was "ex-communicated" from the Panthers by Newton in 1982 for "his own good."^[13]

Trivers died on March 12, 2026, at the age of 83.^[14]

Trivers studied evolutionary theory with Ernst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, when he earned his PhD in biology.^[15] 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.^[10] 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 since Charles Darwin. Arguably his most important paper, it arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by his reading a 1948 paper by Angus Bateman ("Intra-sexual selection in Drosophila") which demonstrated that sex differences in the intensity of selection in fruit flies were based on their ability to obtain mates.^[16] The primary insight of Trivers was that the key variable underlying the evolution of sex differences across species was relative parental investment in offspring.

He was on the faculty at Harvard University from 1973 to 1978, where he continued his work, publishing a influential paper on facultative sex ratio determination (1973), and parent–offspring conflict (1974). He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy (first described in 1976) and discussing intragenomic conflict.^[2] After this work he then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz where he was a faculty member 1978 to 1994. He was a Rutgers University faculty member from 1994 until 2015. In the 2008–09 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.^[17]

Trivers was awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".^[18][19][3]