Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers (/ˈtrɪvərz/; born February 19, 1943) is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), facultative sex ratio determination (1973), and parent–offspring conflict (1974). He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy (first described in 1976) and discussing intragenomic conflict. Trivers studied evolutionary theory with Ernst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, when he earned his PhD in biology. At Harvard he published a series of some of the most influential and highly cited papers in evolutionary biology. His first major paper as a graduate student was "The evolution of reciprocal altruism", published in 1971. In this paper Trivers offers a solution to the longstanding problem of cooperation among unrelated individuals and by doing so overcame a crucial problem for how to police the system by proposing ways that the process of natural selection could evolve ways to detect cheaters. His next major work, "Parental investment and sexual selection", was published the following year. Here Trivers proposed a general framework for understanding sexual selection that had eluded evolutionary thinkers since Charles Darwin. Arguably his most important paper, it arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by his reading a 1948 paper by Angus Bateman (“Intra-sexual selection in Drosophila”) which demonstrated that sex differences in the intensity of selection in fruit flies were based on their ability to obtain mates. The primary insight of Trivers was that the key variable underlying the evolution of sex differences across species was relative parental investment in offspring. More information...
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