The kindness of strangers examines the life of Robert Trivers, the troubled iconoclast who first explained the evolutionary advantages of altruism (for a “selfish” gene):
In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers’s papers.
EO Wilson, who coined the term sociobiology, described him as one of the most influential — and consistently correct — theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time. But he was reckless, aggressive and suffered from bipolar disorder which led him into agonising, debilitating breakdowns. His work was politically controversial. Harvard would not give him a professorship and towards the end of the 70s he seemed to vanish. In fact, he went in 1979 to the University of California in Santa Cruz, then a university with a reputation for drug abuse and slackness. ‘It was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake,’ he says, ‘in the sense that I can’t afford to make another one like that. I survived, and I helped raise my children for a while; but that was all.’
He also switched his attention from theoretical biology to the detailed and difficult study of stretches of DNA and their conflicts within particular bodies. He says: ‘Call it arrogance, overconfidence, or ignorance; it was mostly ignorance, I think. I naively thought – this was my phrase – I’ll whip genetics into shape in three to five years. Fifteen years later, genetics has whipped me into shape. You do not whip genetics into shape within three to five years. It took me eight to 10 to understand what I was reading.’
He has a long, long history of mastering a subject, then moving on:
He was sent to grand schools — at Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts, where the Bushes went, he was regarded as a promising mathematician after he taught himself calculus, in three months, aged 14; and he took two advanced maths courses before he arrived at Harvard. Typically enough, he then lost interest in maths, and decided to be a lawyer instead, fighting injustice, defending people who were minimally criminal. He had grown up in Washington as well as Berlin and Copenhagen, and was keenly aware of injustice and racial discrimination.
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.
While recovering, he took courses in art, and was hired to illustrate, and then to write, a series of textbooks for high schools. Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology. He fell in love with the logic of evolution. In the flow of genes through generations, and the steady, inexorable shaping of behaviour by natural selection, he saw a geometry of time, as beautiful as the geometry of space that Newton and Galileo had discovered.
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