Robert Trivers

Robert Ladlow Trivers was born on February 19, 1943, in Washington, D.C. He began his studies at Harvard University in American history and later mathematics, before turning to evolutionary biology, in which he completed his doctorate. In the early 1970s, he published a series of highly influential papers that laid the theoretical groundwork for much of modern evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

His most significant contribution was the paper "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" (1971), which first explained how helping behavior between unrelated individuals could evolve through natural selection, provided the costs and benefits were reciprocated over time. This theory had a profound impact on behavioral biology and behavioral economics. Trivers also formulated the theory of "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection" (1972), which explained behavioral differences between the sexes in terms of each sex's relative biological investment in offspring — a theory that became a cornerstone of the evolutionary psychology of sex differences.

Another major contribution was his theory of "Parent-Offspring Conflict" (1974), which showed that the genetic interests of parents and offspring, even within biological families, are never entirely aligned, and that this can be the source of many seemingly contradictory behaviors in nature. In later decades, Trivers developed a theory of self-deception, arguing in his book The Folly of Fools (2011) that deceiving oneself can be evolutionarily adaptive because it facilitates deceiving others.

Trivers, who was also closely associated for a time with political activist Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, has taught throughout his academic career at Harvard University and Rutgers University. Richard Dawkins, in his influential book The Selfish Gene (1976), drew extensively on Trivers's theories and described him as among the most important thinkers in evolutionary biology.