When Robert Trivers ’61 was awarded one of the world’s most distinguished prizes in science, it was not for his recent volume on evolutionary genetics, though it has been called “mind-expanding,” “encyclopedic,” and “magisterial.” Nor was it for his research on lying and self-deception, the topic of his forthcoming book and the subject the Rutgers University anthropology professor believes may be the most important he has studied.

Instead, Trivers received the 2007 Crafoord Prize in biosciences for ideas he generated 35 years ago as a Harvard graduate student. The five papers he published between 1971 and 1976 on the evolution of social behavior patterns in animals caused a ripple effect still felt today in the biological sciences.

The Crafoord Prize, awarded April26 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognizes achievements in disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize (which the academy also awards), including mathematics, astronomy, and geosciences. Sweden’s Queen Silvia presented the award to Trivers at Lund Cathedral in a ceremony that culminated a four-day jubilee marking the 25th anniversary of the prize.

Trivers says he is not surprised the honor was awarded specifically for his early efforts. “You always do your most important work when you’re young. It’s a general rule with very few exceptions.” Also, he notes, “The academy likes time to evaluate and see if the work meets the test of time. My new book is no doubt fundamental and will be so for years, but if it’s had any effect so far, it’s been to reassure my colleagues that I’m alive and well.”

Evidence that Trivers’ early ideas have withstood the time test abound in their thousands of citations in scientific literature. He estimates that his second paper, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection”—what he calls the “barn burner” of all his papers—has been cited nearly 5,000 times. It deals with the idea that male and female behaviors are influenced by the size of the stake, or investment, they have in their offspring. Since eggs are structurally and biochemically more complex than sperm and require more metabolic energy to produce, the individual females of most species can parent fewer offspring than their individual male counterparts can. Investing time and energy in rearing their offspring improves the females’ chances of sending their genes along to the next generation. Males, who produce more reproductive cells than females, maximize their chances of passing along their genes by attracting and inseminating as many females as possible. This biological urgency also may explain social behavior patterns such as male sexual jealousy. To attract mates, important male traits are developed over time—such as a bird’s bright plumage or impressive size.

Trivers is perhaps best known for the term reciprocal altruism, the subject of his first paper. In it, he theorized a scientific basis for cooperation between unrelated individuals (expressed in the proverb “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).

The Crafoord is not the first major honor Trivers has collected for his work. In 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from Amherst, in 2005 he was elected a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Time cited him as one of the 20th century’s 100 most influential thinkers. But his path to scientific renown was not direct.

The Washington-born son of a diplomat and a poet, he attended Andover while his parents lived in Berlin. He distinguished himself in mathematics by teaching himself calculus at the age of 14 and chose math as his major at Harvard University. Motivated by political events in the early 1960s, he decided to change his major to history and become a lawyer. When medical problems precluded his attending law school, Trivers was offered a job writing and illustrating social science books for children. Not knowing much about animal behavior, he was assigned a tutor and given plenty of time to study the subject, which included watching films of baboons. His tutor, ornithologist William Drury, introduced him to the evolutionist Ernst Mayr (a later recipient of the Crafoord Prize in biosciences), who encouraged Trivers to pursue doctoral studies at Harvard despite his lack of academic background in biology.

Trivers taught at Harvard for several years, during which time scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Edward O.
Wilson tested and built upon his pioneering ideas. Introducing the professor at an event sponsored by Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said Trivers has been overshadowed in the public eye by those who have popularized his ideas and has gone as an underappreciated genius for many years.

Trivers left Harvard in 1978 to teach biology at the University of California–Santa Cruz. He joined the Black Panthers and befriended Huey Newton, who Trivers later chose as the godfather of one of his children. (To this day, Trivers’ political views are often controversial, resulting in labels such as “social maverick.”) In 1990, while at Santa Cruz, he met a Canadian graduate student 20 years his junior, geneticist Austin Burt. The two began the work that is the subject of their book Genes in Conflict, exploring the idea that genes within an individual organism do not all work toward the common good of that organism—that is, its survival and reproduction.

While most of the 30,000–40,000 genes in the human body are beneficial to us, some have their own interests and manage to spread while harming the individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, Trivers and Burt claim. Such selfish genetic elements are a universal feature of life. They may have negative consequences for the individual host but, in spreading, are responsible over evolutionary time for an array of adaptations—some positive. This understanding could be beneficial in controlling disease, Trivers notes: “The spread of selfish genes causes a variety of medical conditions; a greater understanding of their spread should help us locate and better counter their effects.”

In working on a new book on lying and self-deception, Trivers has turned his attention toward a subject he has thought about for decades. As a scholarship student at PA, he had a job to do every other week. “I noticed that in the weeks I did my scholarship work, I got more accomplished in my studies,” he says. “My interpretation is that when I didn’t have the job to go to, I’d say to myself, ‘I’ve got six more hours before I have to study for this test,’ and then not study for eight hours.”

He also notes the self-deception employed in many religious practices and beliefs. That does not get in the way of his own church attendance and prayer—habits instilled in him by a Presbyterian mother and years of Sunday school. As he explains it, he doesn’t believe in the power of intercessionary prayer, rather in praying “for things you can affect, like your own personality.”

According to Trivers, lying is an evolutionary strategy. “We lie to ourselves the better to lie to others. If we are efficient at it—if the lie is unconscious—it has much less cognitive cost.” Ideas about lying and self-deception have existed for a long time, he says, citing Freud and Marx, “but nobody had a proper theory grounded in evolutionary logic. The problem is getting the evidence together. That’s the major nut I want to crack.”

In addition to working on his book, Trivers oversees a long-term collaborative study in Jamaica, where he resides several months each year. Begun in 1996, the project examines the link between childhood growth patterns and a variety of physiological and social factors. Trivers believes the study represents the world’s most detailed set of human body measurements focused on symmetry (the degree to which the two sides of the body are similar). The data on bodily asymmetry and how it changes with age could lead to insights about the development of diseases. “Associations have already been found with breast cancer and schizophrenia,” he says.

Regarding his success, Trivers refers to the New Testament parable of the talents: “I always felt I had exceptional talents, or gifts. You owe it to yourself to use your talents to good effect,” he says. “Looking back, I know that the happy, good times in my life were when I was using those gifts the way they were intended to be used, and the bad times were when, for one reason or another, I was not using them, or I was using them improperly.”   

Trivers considers the Crafoord Prize award of $500,000 an important honorific. “It’s without question the greatest recognition I’ve received and the greatest I will receive,” he says. “The academy isn’t just saying ‘We think you’re nifty.’ It’s saying, ‘We think your work is important to the tune of a half-million dollars in good Swedish krona.’”