Footnote Physicist

 by Steven Gussman I never met Dr. Trivers. As such, I feel a bit silly writing a scientific obituary for him. I do not want to take any attention away from his actual family, friends, and colleagues, whose obituaries I am looking forward to reading. But Dr. Trivers did touch my life. Like many others, I first learned about Dr. Trivers and his ideas from Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene 1  and Steven Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate . 2   For me, these were the heady days of 2018. I had just graduated from college a year before, and taught a semester as a PTL (before getting kicked out for political reasons). I was on a crash course learning about postmodernsim, The Long March Through The Institutions, and how so much of social “science” was hostile to evolutionary biology. Pinker showed how Trivers’ ideas brought the social down to a hard science, like physics, by revealing the underlying evolutionary logic that explains how and why such behavioral traits ev...