Organism: Robert Ludlow Trivers (1943-2026) Obituary
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 Gene1 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 evolved. This was a deeply exhilarating display of reductionism. From reciprocal altruism, to parental investment theory, to familial conflict theory, to the self-deception hypothesis. Though I had already spent quite a bit of time on philosophy of science, physics, and evolutionary biology, I was worried about where to start with psychology—I had heard about nothing but the replication crisis, even before I learned that most academics don’t think psychology is a thoroughly biological phenomenon. If between one third and half3 of findings were goofy “fun facts” that weren’t even true, where to actually start? The Blank Slate was the perfect place: Pinker wrote about the rigorous sciences of the mind—cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. In hindsight, I was catching a mid-2010s resurgence in popularity (the editions of both The Selfish Gene and The Blank Slate that I read had been new 2016 editions). I remember where I was—at my then-girlfriend’s apartment in central Jersey—when I was enamored, reading about this fascinating character, Trivers, and his theory of familial conflict (that each child thinks he deserves twice the resources as his siblings because he shares twice the genes with himself, putting mom in an impossible position in terms of apportioning resources). How exciting for logic so clear and inevitable to be laid bare, explaining so much of family life in one fell swoop! Similarly, I have fond memories of taking my then-girlfriend to a flea market, buying a Skeptic magazine with Trivers on the cover, and later hiding away in the bathroom at a friend’s party, to read in it an excerpt from Trivers’ memoir, Wild Life.4 I became addicted to the idea of explaining behavior, psychology, and sociology through genetic selection, and annoyed friends and family by talking about evolution, nonstop.
I’ll also never forget the first time I heard Trivers’ voice! On a business road trip with my then-boss, I popped on an episode of Science Salon (now The Michael Shermer Show) in which Trivers was interviewed.5 I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got! A clearly brilliant, but plain-spoken and politically incorrect, “old white guy,” voice filled the car, causing my boss to shoot me the funniest look after how I had hyped him up. I remember that at one agreeable point in the interview, Trivers advised women to listen to their instincts and cross the street if the hair on the back of their neck stands up at the sight of a strange man—and not to refrain from doing so in the case that the individual is black, for fear of coming off as racist. And then there was the way Dr. Trivers would refer to actual human beings in his everyday life as, “organisms,” even when speaking colloquially.6 All of this only served to make this legendary character all the more interesting!
Trivers, Dawkins, Pinker, E. O. Wilson, Saad, etc. Though I had never met these scholars, let alone had them as professors, I came to be a student of their schools of thought through books and podcasts. Trivers proved to be just as unpretentious as he sounded, over the years. Despite the fact that I was a nobody, had no formal training in biology, and didn’t hold a graduate degree in any topic, Trivers would respond to me from time to time on Twitter (which is rare even for men 1% as prestigious). Typically, this might be a simple, “like,” or a curt affirmative response to a yes or no question.7 In 2021, he tweeted me directly—and seemingly angrily, in all caps about how he believed Trump was a psychopath (I had been pointing out that it’s wrong for social media companies to censor anyone, much less the duly elected President of the United States).8 I politely disagreed and thanked him for his work in evolutionary theory, which by my memory he, “liked” (though I don’t see this part, now). How fun! A hero and legendarily, “crazy,” guy had crashed out on me a bit over politics! But as the 2020s went on, he appeared to engage with me a bit more deeply. The great man, “liked,” and retweeted a tweet of mine in which I realized that Triversian reciprocity is more fundamental than Hamiltonian kin selection.9 While I was otherwise bored in a dying Pennsylvania shopping mall, I was tapping out a long Twitter thread criticizing physicist Giorgio Parisi’s ignorant rant against sociobiology in his then-new book, In a Flight of Starlings.10 I later learned Dr. Trivers had read through and liked tweet after tweet in my thread explaining the history and science of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology!11 This was so exhilarating, and helped transform an otherwise dreadful time and place in my life into one of the best. When nothing was going my way in life, one of the greatest living scientists took a moment of his time to connect with me. Months later, he liked part of a twitter thread of mine about incest avoidance.12 Still later, he liked a long-tweet I wrote criticizing the lack of Bayesianism in the interpretation of polygraph test results.13 Next he retweeted my blogs in defense of genetic determinism.14 And finally, when Dr. Colin Wright published my defense of parental investment theory in Reality’s Last Stand (a critique of Tombak et al. (2024)),15 Dr. Trivers liked and retweeted the article!16 Soon after, he stopped using Twitter, and his retweets of my article ended up being some of his final tweets (though his account was taken down around February 16th, 2026). I had wondered where he’d gone, and why I’d been unable to get his attention in the past year or so, and was saddened to learn from Bret Weinstein’s and Heather Heying’s podcast that the great man was on his deathbed.17
For
almost the last decade, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the deaths
of my heroes.18 Almost as quick as I learn of them, they’re gone. Carl Sagan and
Christopher Hitchens were gone before I’d even learned of them. In
the worlds of biology and psychology alone, we’ve seen the deaths
of Judith Rich Harris (1938-2018), Napoleon Chagnon (1938-2019),
Aaron Beck (1921-2021), E. O. Wilson (1929-2021), John Tooby
(1952-2023), Frans de Waal (1948-2024), Daniel Dennett (1942-2024),
Don Symons (1942-2024), Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), Jane Goodall
(1934-2025), James Watson (1928-2025), and now the great Robert
Trivers (1943-2026). May he
rest in peace. Could we
possibly manage to carry the torch?
Footnotes:
1. Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene, xxv-xxvii, 160, 165-170, 178, 182, 191-193, 202-204, 220, 226, 229-233, 239-244, 262, 394, 420-421, 429. Oxford University Press.
2. Pinker, S. (2016). The Blank Slate, 108, 111, 241, 244, 248, 251-252, 263-264, 266, 271, 301, 319, 343, 389. Penguin Books.
3. Yong, E. (2018, August 27). Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies. The Atlantic. https://web.archive.org/web/20260209014911/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientists-can-collectively-sense-which-psychology-studies-are-weak/568630/.
Camerer, C. F. et al. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behavior. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z.
4. Trivers, R. (2015). The Wild Life of an Evolutionary Biologist. Skeptic, 20(4), 32-42.
5. Skeptic. (2017, December 18). Michael Shermer with Dr. Robert Trivers — Evolutionary Theory & Human Nature (Science Salon # 16) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvCV0r4gj7U.
6. Robert Trivers [@TriversRobert]. (2024, March 23). Beautiful photo of an extremely UGLY organism—Donald Trump!! [Post]. X. https://x.com/TriversRobert/status/1771624963360862605.
7. Robert Trivers [@TriversRobert]. (2019, March 13). in principle yes [Post]. X. https://x.com/TriversRobert/status/1105861784227979266.
8. Robert Trivers [@TriversRobert]. (2021, May 5). YES BUT HE IS AND WAS A PSYCHOPATH [Post]. X. https://x.com/TriversRobert/status/1390114118762385409.
9. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2024, May 10). I realized last night that while I tend to think of kin selection (W. D… [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1788807321050660923.
10. Parisi, G. (2023). In a Flight of Starlings, 88. Penguin Press.
11. Steven Gussman [@sophistructure]. (2023, July 22). With all due respect to @giorgioparisi, and I'm otherwise enjoying In A Flight Of Starlings… [Post]. X. https://x.com/Sophistructure/status/1682876456089579521.
12. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2023, August 26). ... for which sex takes on this role, but @TriversRobert's parental investment theory seems like a… [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1695558199837913350.
13. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2023, November 12). @StuartJRitchie wrote an interesting article arguing that the statistical evidence supposedly in favor of polygraph... [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1723658328637604218.
14. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2024, April 30). This trio of articles on my blog is my defense of, "genetic determinism." Cited (does... [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1785486864360919319.
15. Gussman, S. (2024). Yes, Male Mammals Tend to be Larger Than Females. Reality’s Last Stand. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/yes-male-mammals-tend-to-be-larger.
16. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2024, June 20). The paywall has lifted on, "Yes, Male Mammals Tend To Be Larger Than Females: A... [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1803817675023429761.
17. Bret Weinstein. (2026, February 4). Epstein, Trivers, and Gender: The 312th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, 27:05-28:19 [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/QM44cbyYNNY?t=1625.
18. Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2025, November 9). James Watson (1928-2025) Jane Goodall (1934-2025) Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) Don Symons (1942... [Post]. X. https://x.com/schwinn3/status/1987676487521120280.
Steven Gussman [@schwinn3]. (2025, November 9). R.I.P. James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helical form (and particular chemical… [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DQ2xHEZjjpb/?igsh=MXFsZjNpbmU1bGlxMw%3D%3D.
Appendix: Tweets
I had originally linked to these tweets only, but now that Dr. Trivers' account has been taken down, I am including screenshots I had taken (as well as some that were not mentioned in the body).
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