From The evolutionary revolutionary:
”What I like to do,” the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers said on a recent afternoon in his office in Harvard Square, ”and in retrospect what I’m good at, is going into a field, seeing an opportunity to do intellectual work that hasn’t been done in it, do as much as I can and then move the [expletive] on, you know?”Trivers has been teaching himself things and then growing bored with them his whole life. In 1956, when he was 13 and living in Berlin (his father was posted there by the State Department), he taught himself all of calculus in about three months. Around the same time, and with more modest success, Trivers — a skinny child picked on by bullies — tried to learn how to box, doing push-ups and covertly reading Joe Louis’s ”How to Box” in the school library.
Trivers would go on to join the boxing team at Phillips Academy, Andover. He would also go on to drop math his freshman year at Harvard, decide to become a lawyer, suffer a nervous breakdown that kept him from getting in to any law schools, enroll in Harvard’s doctoral program in biology without having taken a single biology class as an undergraduate, and — while still a grad student — write the first in a series of papers that would revolutionize the field of evolutionary biology.
Then he dropped from sight. Rebuffed in his demand for early tenure, he left Harvard in 1978 to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He befriended Huey Newton and joined the Black Panthers. He all but stopped publishing. As the literary agent John Brockman put it when introducing Trivers at a recent talk, ”Over the years there were rumors about a series of breakdowns; he was in Jamaica; in jail. He fell off the map.”