Robert Trivers

Robert Ludlow Trivers [ ˈtrɪvərz ] (born February 19, 1943 in Washington, DC ) is an American sociobiologist and evolutionary biologist . He was best known for the concept of reciprocal altruism .

Life

Robert Trivers was born on February 19, 1943 in Washington DC. He was the second of seven children of a foreign service employee. In 1956 he lived in Berlin for a short time. After studying mathematics at Harvard University , he switched to history and earned his bachelor's degree in American history in 1965. For two years he wrote and illustrated children's books. He then returned to Harvard to study biology from 1968 to 1972, and earned his doctorate in 1972.

From 1973 to 1978 Trivers was a lecturer in biology at Harvard. In 1978 he went to the University of California, Santa Cruz , where he stayed until 1994. From 1994 to 2017 he was Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick (New Jersey) . He was also an associate professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey from 1999 to 2017. He then spent a year as a Presidential Fellow in Biology and Evolutionary Psychology at Chapman University in Orange, California .

Trivers joined the Black Panthers , an African American black power movement , in 1979 .

In 2005 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2008/09 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin .

Research areas

Social evolution

Triver's work deals, among other things, with the development of selfish genes and with social evolution in the context of evolutionary psychology . One of Trivers' early research areas is reciprocal altruism . In addition, he dealt with the so-called parental investment. This describes the behavior of a parent that increases the likelihood of survival - and thus reproductive success - of an individual offspring while reducing investment in other offspring (how much should be invested in a child?). Closely related to this topic is the parent-child conflict , on which Trivers published a paper in 1974 that dealt with the tension between parents and offspring that can arise between those involved over the amount of investments made by parents in their children.

Another area of Trivers research is sexual selection . This is the competition between individuals of the same sex for sexual partners and the achievement of reproductive success. A detailed question here is the formation of secondary gender characteristics . The preoccupation with the evolution of gender differences and the development of the gender relationship between male and female led Trivers to the Trivers-Willard principle , which relates the parents' preference for boys or girls to social status. The question of conflicting genes within an individual (father genes versus mother genes, selfish genetic elements ) also falls into the research area of the two sexes . Another subject of Trivers research deals with deception and self-deception ( Deceit and Self-Deception ).

Body asymmetry

With the long-term research project The Rutgers Jamaican Symmetry Project , Trivers has been studying the effects of body asymmetries in 288 children on their biographies, for example in terms of attractiveness, dance skills, aggressiveness, number of friends and other parameters, since 1996.

Works

Article (selection)

The evolution of reciprocal altruism. In: Quarterly Review of Biology. 46, 1971, pp. 35-57.
Parental investment and sexual selection. In: Campbell, Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man. 1972.
with DE Willard: Natural selection of parental ability to vary the sex ratio of offspring. In: Science. 179, 1973, pp. 90-92. See Trivers-Willard Principle .
Parent-Offspring Conflict. In: American Zoologist. 14, 1974, pp. 249-264.
with HP Newton: The crash of flight 90: Doomed by self-deception? In: Science Digest. November 1982, pp. 66-67, 111.
The evolution of sex. In: Quarterly Review of Biology. 58, 1983, pp. 62-67.
with R. Hicks: The social behavior of Anolis valencienii. In: A. Rhodin, K. Miyata (Eds.): Advances in Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology. Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge 1983, pp. 570-595.
with J. Seger: Asymmetry in the evolution of female mating preferences. In: Nature. 319, 1986, pp. 771-773.
Sex differences in rates of recombination and sexual selection . In R. Michod, D. Levin (Eds.): The Evolution of Sex: An Examination of Current Ideas . Sinauer, Sunderland, MA 1988.
Deceit and self-deception: The relationship between communication and consciousness. In: M. Robinson, L. Tiger (Eds.): Man and Beast Revisited. Smithsonian, Washington, DC, 1991, pp. 175-191.
with M. Polak: The science of symmetry in biology. In: Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 9, 1994, pp. 122-124.
with D. Haig: The evolution of parental imprinting: A review of hypotheses. In: R. Ohlsson, K. Hall, M. Ritzen (Eds.): Genomic Imprinting: Causes and Consequences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995.
Genetic basis of intrapsychic conflict. In: N. Segal, G. Weisfeld, C. Weisfeld (Eds.): Uniting Psychology and Biology. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC 1997, pp. 385-395.
with J. Manning, R. Thornhill, D. Singh, J. Denham, M. Eklo, R. Anderton: Ear asymmetry and left-side cradling. In: Evolution and Human Behavior. 18, 1997, pp. 327-340.
As They Would Do to You. Review of: Elliot Sober, David Sloan Wilson: Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. In: Skeptic. Vol. 6, No. 4, 1998.
with A. Burt: Selfish DNA and breeding system in flowering plants. In: Proc. R. Soc. Lond. 265, 1998, pp. 141-146.
with A. Burt: Genetic conflicts in genomic imprinting. In: Proc. Royal Society. B. 265, 1998, pp. 2393-2397.
with A. Burt: Kinship and genomic imprinting . In R. Ohlsson (Ed.): Genomic Imprinting. Springer, Heidelberg 1999, pp. 1-23.
with JT Manning, R. Thornhill, D. Singh and M. Mcguire: Jamaican Symmetry Project: Long-Term Study of Fluctuating Asymmetry in Rural Jamaican Children. In: Human Biology. June 1999, v. 71, no. 3, pp. 417-430.
with JT Manning, D. Singh and R. Thornhill: The mystery of female beauty. In: Nature. 399, 1999, pp. 214-215.
with JT Manning, R. Thornhill and D. Singh: The 2nd: 4th digit ratio and hand preference in Jamaican children. In: Laterality. 2000.
The elements of a scientific theory of self-deception . Annals NY Acad Sciences 907, 2000, pp. 114-131.
with JT Manning, L. Barley et al .: The 2nd: 4th digit ratio, sexual dimorphism, population differences and reproductive success: evidence for sexually antagonistic genes in humans. In: Evolution and Human Behavior. 21, 2000, pp. 163-183.
Mutual Benefits at All Levels of Life. In: Science. 304, 2004, pp. 964-965.

Books

1985: Social Evolution . Benjamin / Cummings, Menlo Park, CA, ISBN 0-8053-8507-X .
2002: Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert L. Trivers. Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-513061-8 ( limited preview in Google Book Search ).
2006 (with Austin Burt): Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-674-01713-7 .
2009 (with Brian G. Palestis and Darine Zaatari): The Anatomy of a Fraud: Symmetry and Dance. TPZ Publishers, ISBN 978-0-615-28756-0 .
2011: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Basic Books, New York, ISBN 978-0-465-02755-2 .
German: Fraud and self-deception. How we successfully lie to ourselves and others. Translated by Sebastian Vogel . Ullstein, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-8437-0513-4 ( limited preview in Google book search ).
2015: Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist. Plympton, ISBN 978-1938972126 .

Prizes and awards

Crafoord Prize 2007

Web links

Personal website with videos, list of publications, reviews, etc.
Trivers' pursuit portrait in Psychology Today , January 2016

Individual evidence

↑ Pack the air guitar from Article about a series of experiments on the attractiveness of dancers as part of the Rutgers Jamaican Symmetry Project , heise.de, December 22, 2005.
↑ Results on the relationship between symmetrical knees and the ability to run quickly: Article on PLOS ONE 2013, 8 (8): e72244, Article on PLOS ONE 2014, 9 (11): e113106. See also summary on Trivers' website and video presentation .

personal data
SURNAME	Trivers, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Trivers, Robert L .; Trivers, Robert Ludlow
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American biologist
DATE OF BIRTH	February 19, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH	Washington, DC

[1] Pack the air guitar from Article about a series of experiments on the attractiveness of dancers as part of the Rutgers Jamaican Symmetry Project , heise.de, December 22, 2005.

[2] Results on the relationship between symmetrical knees and the ability to run quickly: Article on PLOS ONE 2013, 8 (8): e72244, Article on PLOS ONE 2014, 9 (11): e113106. See also summary on Trivers' website and video presentation .