In the 1970s, after 12 decades of on-again-off-again enthusiasm, a couple of near-death experiences, and ongoing dismissal as a series of just-so stories, the Darwinian idea seemed finally to be coming to a triumphant vindication: a Grand Unified Theory of biology. Thinking like a Darwinian either could explain everything, or soon would, from why butterfly wings had markings that looked like an owl’s eyes, to why nations went to war, to the illusion of God. I was a student in the 1970s, and I vividly remember being caught up in the enthusiasm.

Robert Ludlow Trivers, who died on March 12^th of this year, was one of the cohort of biologists creating the Darwinian GUT, which included such luminaries as Richard Dawkins, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, Robert May, and many other less-well-known acolytes. Trivers, along with Edward O. Wilson, was one of the architects of the emerging field of sociobiology, which presumed to bring the social sciences under the Darwinian umbrella. This would be the salvation of sociology, they argued, which no longer would be pseudoscientific stamp collecting dressed up with dubious statistics, and would open the way for the social ‘sciences’ to drop the scare quotes.

Wilson was a pioneering student of insect societies, of which the ultimate expressions were the “eusocial” insects: ants, bees, wasps, and termites. Humans were not ants, so the social sciences could, for a time, argue that insect societies could have nothing meaningful to say about human societies. Robert Trivers knocked the props out from under that defense. Trivers extended Wilson’s ideas to a general theory of social interactions that could apply to a broad range of social systems, from social insects to bacterial communities to, yes, humans.

His novel theories earned him the 2007 Crafoord Prize, which he described as the “evolution Nobel.” This was an exaggeration on Trivers’s part: there is no “evolution Nobel,” Trivers’s prize was in the Biosciences. I am not picking nits: exaggeration, looseness with facts, and lack of humility were significant aspects of Robert Trivers’s personality, which must be taken into account to understand both Trivers’s scientific achievements and the mind that gave rise to them.

Trivers’s work focused on altruism, which has always been a sticking point for the Darwinian idea. Darwin himself was befuddled by honeybee workers, who not only were sterile but were willing, even eager, to sacrifice their lives for the hive. How, Darwin pondered, could natural selection, which required both reproduction and self-preservation, produce an altruistic honeybee worker who did neither? He never arrived at a satisfactory answer.

By the 1930s, genetics had opened up a possible solution to Darwin’s dilemma: kinship. As JBS Haldane quipped at the time, he would gladly give his life to save two brothers, who shared half their genes with JBS, but it would take four cousins to make the sacrifice worthwhile. In the logic of gene selection, it mattered not whether JBS passed along his own genes, or whether he doubled the chance his siblings could pass along identical copies of JBS’s genes. The closer the kinship, the higher the likelihood that altruistic acts would pay off genetically.

Inconveniently for that explanation, altruism keeps cropping up where kinship ties are looser. Where bee societies have a peculiar kinship structure that seems to dispose them toward extreme acts of altruism, termite workers have looser kinship ties with their nestmates, yet exhibit altruism that is just as extreme. In prairie dog towns, where kinship ties are looser still, individual prairie dogs act as sentinels, warning the other prairie dogs if a hawk is circling above looking for a meal, even as he draws the hawk’s attention to himself. And, of course, human societies present many examples of selfless sacrifice, ranging from war to saving even a distantly related stranger in peril.

Trivers sought to take altruism out of the kinship narrative by applying game theory to the problem, mostly some variation of the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma game. He aimed to map out so-called Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESSs) that could shape the evolution of social interactions. Among the ESSs Trivers identified were behaviors that could appear altruistic, but really weren’t.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma game pits two prisoners, A and B, accused of the same crime, against one another. The police interrogate them separately: what do the prisoners do? There are four possible outcomes to this game. (1) Prisoner A benefits by selling out Prisoner B; (2) Prisoner B benefits by selling out Prisoner A; (3) both Prisoner A and Prisoner B sell each other out, and both lose, and (4) Prisoner A and Prisoner B cooperate to dupe the interrogators so that both get off scot-free. Outcomes (1) and (2) can be an ESS for either Prisoner A or Prisoner B, but not both. Outcome (3) cannot be an ESS, because both prisoners are harmed. Outcome (4) in which both prisoners risk their own well-being to benefit the other can be an ESS. Trivers dubbed Outcome (4) reciprocal altruism.

The fly in Trivers’s ointment was the susceptibility of reciprocal altruism to cheating. If Prisoner B benefits from Prisoner A’s sacrifice, but cheats by not returning the favor at some time, Outcome (4) collapses to Outcome (1), vice versa if Prisoner A is the cheater. Trivers’s startling insight was that deception was a principal defense against cheating. Prisoner B must be tricked somehow into believing Prisoner A has committed a truly altruistic act. Furthermore, Prisoner A must deceive himself into believing he has made a sacrifice that benefits Prisoner B.

His theory of reciprocal altruism is what earned Trivers his Crafoord Prize. He well deserved it. He took a recalcitrant problem in Darwinian theory, identified gene selection and kinship as the source of the recalcitrance, and refocused the discussion onto life’s essential transactional nature: “I will scratch your back today on the promise that you will one day scratch mine.” In so doing, he created a broad theory of social systems that could apply to everything from microbial communities to human societies and to evolution itself. Swap out Prisoner A and Prisoner B for Species A and Species B, and the same theory applies.

It was a brilliant synthesis, but Trivers did not so much explain altruism as he explained it away. In doing so, he employed the exasperating logical fallacy so common to the Darwinian tribe: phenomenon X—altruism, design, intentionality, etc—is contrary to the Darwinian idea, so the solution is to find a clever way to paint phenomenon X as a credulous illusion. The “best” explanation is the one that best sustains the illusion. In the Darwinian world, there could be no such thing as altruism, only selfishness built on a foundation of deception and lies.

Trivers’s game theory approach to altruism was indisputably clever, but it must be kept in mind that it was cleverness in service of that logical fallacy: sophistry, in a word. Nor could any credible challenge ever be made to the claim. Perhaps, someone might suggest, that altruism was not an illusion but exactly what it appeared to be, a sacrifice made for the benefit of another. Any such claim could be dismissed as simply the critic’s own self-deception! In this hall of mirrors, Trivers left no room for any sound theory of morals or ethics, creating a vacuum into which a host of social pathologies have since swarmed. In the end, Trivers’s ideas undermine the Darwinian GUT, instead bolstering the criticism of the Darwinian idea as nihilistic, tautological, sophist, unfalsifiable, and scholastic.

More interesting is the mind that finds such emptiness agreeable. Here, the best guide is not Trivers’s Crafoord Prize, or his various books and publications, but his autobiography, Wild Life. It’s a rollicking good read, equal parts James Watson’s The Double Helix, Kerry Mullis’s Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As an autobiographer, Trivers is remarkably honest, which gives the reader interesting insights into how Trivers’s mind worked.

Robert Trivers was, to put it mildly, a difficult and troubled man.

Today, we would describe Trivers as Borderline Personality, Bipolar, Manic-Depressive, Attention Deficit Hyperactive, or some similar and vaguely defined psychiatric disorder. He was completely open about this aspect of his personality: he estimated he’d spent a year of his life under various types of mental care lockdown, some voluntary and some not. When he was not under confinement, he often skirted close to it, smoking dope with the psychopathic Huey Newton, joining the Black Panther Party as a street soldier—Huey Newton eventually disabused Trivers of that folly—or hanging out with denizens of the sublunary shadows of Jamaican society, where he lived for much of his adult life. There, he was deeply immersed in the webs of deceit and lies that confirmed his theories. Sometimes, he seems to have been deceiving himself over those lies. In Wild Life, for example, he often blames the social pathologies surrounding him as products of racism or American colonialism. In some instances, his encounters ended in violence: in some, he was the victim, in others the instigator. He often carried defensive weapons and was good with his fists. His life was marked by turmoil, fights, and emotional abuse of others. It’s remarkable that he died a natural death in bed.

And yet, Trivers’s last graduate student, Robert Lynch, ended his memoriam for Trivers this way: “I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.” Lynch’s ambivalent send-off is apt. I’ve worked with several colleagues who fall somewhere along the same personality disorder spectrum as Trivers, and they have been among my favorite colleagues: bonny field companions, adventurous risk-takers, always looking at problems differently, always driven by an outsize ego that borders on narcissism. Those same individuals also count as some of my worst colleagues: moody, prone to outbursts of rage and abuse, usually targeted at whoever is handy, which often was me. This was the paradox of Robert Trivers: he could not have done what he did without the adventurousness and risk-taking that is necessary for science to advance. Even if those ideas are wrong, as I believe Trivers’s to be, science is fundamentally an ongoing conversation with nature, and even wrong ideas can shift the conversation in penetrating ways. Robert Trivers did that. But the very bright also are often difficult people, as Robert Trivers was. Sometimes you have to take the package.

A robust culture of science should be able to find a safe haven for such contradictory personalities. The university traditionally has played that role. Did Trivers find that safe haven? Arguably, no. Trivers had three academic homes: Harvard, the University of California, Santa Cruz (full disclosure, my alma mater), and Rutgers University. He was not an easy fit in any of them. For Harvard and Santa Cruz, his departures were motivated mostly by boredom. At Santa Cruz, he was rarely on campus, preferring to smoke dope with Huey Newton, who was a PhD student in Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program, and hanging out with Bernie Le Boeuf, an elephant seal expert, who spent most of his time at his field site several miles north of Santa Cruz. One gets the sense that all parties at both Harvard and Santa Cruz breathed sighs of relief on Trivers’s parting. Even so, Harvard and Santa Cruz were willing to tolerate Trivers’s difficult character because they thought his intellect was a fair trade.

His departure from Rutgers was less pleasant.

As he had at Harvard and Santa Cruz, Trivers clashed with his Rutgers colleagues, some of whom he worked closely with. The flash point at Rutgers was a dispute with a colleague, Lee Cronk, over the retraction of a co-authored paper, which Trivers suspected contained manipulated data. Though Cronk was not the co-author under suspicion, he opposed retracting the paper, even when a Rutgers investigation into the matter sided with Trivers. This led to shouting matches in Cronk’s office, which everyone could hear. As is often the case, details differed. Trivers claimed he was just being vehement, loud, and alpha-male-ish, as was his wont, but never violent. For his part, Cronk was so disturbed by these encounters that he feared the arguments would escalate to violence, a fear probably helped along by Trivers’s habit of carrying a knife. During one incident, Cronk phoned the Rutgers police. This got Trivers banned from the Rutgers campus for several months in 2012, and he was only allowed back under a restraining order to keep him out of Cronk’s way.

From that point, Trivers’s fate at Rutgers was sealed: he had to go. What Trivers had not accounted for was the rise of the therapeutic university. Where Trivers’s difficult personality might once have been shrugged off as simply the price of having a brilliant mind down the hall, Trivers was now regarded as a serial disturber of the academic peace of students and faculty, which must not ever be allowed lest feelings be hurt. Rutgers could not simply fire Trivers, however, so a trap had to be set to induce Trivers to leave on his own.

To anyone who’s seen such a trap in action, or experienced it himself, the signs at Rutgers are abundantly clear. They were not clear to Trivers, however, who assumed he would be shielded by that zone of academic tolerance that might once have existed, but no longer did. And speaking of lies and deceit, the trap was built on dishonesty and deflection.

The trap was set with a reassignment of Trivers’s teaching duties. His signature course would be turned over to a younger colleague, and Trivers would now teach a new course on Human Aggression. When Trivers objected, the Rutgers administration marked him as insubordinate: Count 1. So much for academic freedom. (Notably, Trivers remained on good terms with the junior colleague who took over his course, who also defended him as the trap was closing around Trivers.) When Trivers took on his new course, he invited the students to learn the material along with him—to my mind, a perfectly appropriate academic thing to do. As a student in the 70s, I would have been thrilled at such an invitation. For that, Trivers was accused of dragging students into his dispute with the university: Count 2. (There is no evidence I have been able to find of any complaints from students.) For that transgression, Trivers was suspended with pay, pending an investigation: Count 3. When Trivers was informed that this was a prelude to a suspension without pay. At that point, Trivers left Rutgers.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the end of Robert Trivers’s career signals something deeper about the troubles plaguing our system of higher education. That Trivers was a difficult personality is beyond question. Yet, the history of science is rife with difficult personalities whose disputes did not impede scientific progress, but often helped it along. We have tasked our universities with managing the issue so that there is net progress, and this has often involved a skillful balancing act on everyone’s part. Is that balancing act even possible if a university’s top management priority is to protect feelings? I fear that the therapeutic culture that drove Trivers out of Rutgers is systemic, which will deprive us of the difficult genius that is the foundation of great science. In the words of John Maier, one of his obituarists, Trivers would never stand a chance if he were starting as an assistant professor today.

I fear he might be right.

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