The evolutionary revolutionary

Posted 28 March 2005 by Steve Reuland

↗ The current version of this post is on the live site: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/03/the-evolutionar.html

Anyone familiar with evolutionary biology will probably have heard of Robert Trivers, the brilliant scientist who made major contributions to evolutionary theory back in the 70s. Unbeknownst to me, he had been on hiatus for a good while. Now it appears he’s back. The Boston Globe has an article about Trivers, his work, his eccentric life, and his impending return to the spotlight:

The evolutionary revolutionary.

It’s a good read.

7 Comments

Bayesian Bouffant · 28 March 2005

But Trivers has not limited his ideas to animals. The second half of his first major paper, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" (1971), was dedicated to hypothesizing that a large proportion of human emotion and experience-gratitude, sympathy, guilt, trust, friendship, and moral outrage among them-grew out of the same sort of simple tit-for-tat logic that governed the interactions between, say, certain fish and the species of shrimp that cleaned their gills.

The author is suffering under the illusion that humans are not animals. A small point, perhaps, but it's one of my pet peeves. Will Trivers' ideas on self-deception stand up, or is he deceiving himself?

Steviepinhead · 28 March 2005

Maybe it was just me, but I couldn't get the link to the article to work in anything like real time...

Steviepinhead · 28 March 2005

Maybe it was just me, but I couldn't get the link to the article to work in anything like real time..

advanced hominid · 28 March 2005

the brilliant scientist who made major contributions to evolutionary theory back in the 70s.

Does this mean he actually came up with some evidence? That would be so awesome....

Steve Reuland · 29 March 2005

Maybe it was just me, but I couldn't get the link to the article to work in anything like real time..

It works fine for me.

Steve Reuland · 29 March 2005

Does this mean he actually came up with some evidence? That would be so awesome . . . .
— advanced hominid

Trollish statements like this would be less entertaining if they didn't indicate that you hadn't read the article.

Steviepinhead · 29 March 2005

The link worked fine today--leading to fascinating stuff. And sorry for the double post, I'm still getting used to the interface on this great site!