Robert Trivers > Quotes

“The great sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly "Oh master," he was asked, "what is the most difficult thing to do?" "To know thyself", he replied. "And the easiest?" "To give advice to others.”
― Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others

“A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge—that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she maybe.”
― Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

“However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don't.”
― Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others

“The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.”
― Robert Trivers, Social Evolution

“Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status”
― Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others

“A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge - that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she might be.”
― Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others

“My favorite joke of his occurred when George was telling me about the joys of grandfatherhood. “If I could have figured out how to have grandchildren without having children first, I would have done so.” Later on, I knew just what he meant – high relatedness, no work. Or as Melvin Newton (Huey’s brother) once put it, “You can serve them ice cream for breakfast, what do you care?”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us”
― Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

“I was once watching a herring gull through binoculars side by side with Bill. In those days, a herring gull could not scratch itself without one of us asking why natural selection favored that behavior. In any case, I offered as an explanation for the ongoing gull behavior something that was nonfunctional and suggested that the animal was not capable of acting in its own self-interest. Bill said quietly, “Never assume the animal you are studying is as stupid as the one studying it.” I remember looking sideways at him and saying to myself “Yes sir! I like this person. I can learn from him.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“Prior to my breakdown I went through a 5 week manic phase, with increasing mental excitation, decreasing sleep, and a near certainty that I wa sthe first person to actually understand what Ludwig Wittgenstein was actually saying.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“A kind of bias I share says that if a human thinks symmetry is important it may or may not be, but if a bird thinks symmetry is important, it very likely is!”
― Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers

“Denial is apt to be quicker than the truth, and so are well-rehearsed lies.”
― Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

“My Jamaican symmetry project is twenty years old, and we have now shown that knee symmetry is a key variable in sprinting success; we can use it to predict sprinting success fourteen years into the future, and also to predict which of Jamaica’s elite sprinters are the very best.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist