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...

by Steven Gussman  THE PROBLEM           My sister, Katie Gussman, and her boyfriend, J. C. Lopez have two pet cats, Twitchy and Chewy. 1   These cats grew up together in their home(s) from a relatively young age (though old enough to be spayed and put up for adoption, at a few months), and generally got along.  Presently, they must be kept on completely separate floors of their home so that Chewy does not violently attack Twitchy (ironically, Katie identifies Twitchy as having been the benevolent dominant before this began).  Even from separate floors, Chewy will howl at and track Twitchy.  Between the two of them, several hypotheses have been proffered about what caused this. J.C. thinks it has something to do with an event that occurred just weeks before the problem began: Katie brought the cats to our parents' home, which houses two cats, Catnis and Datchi (a generally non-violent, rescued stray).  Upon introduction, Ch...