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Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers
Robert Trivers is a pioneering figure in the field of sociobiology. For Natural Selection and Social Theory, he has selected eleven of his most influential papers, including several classic papers from the early 1970s on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflicts, and asymmetry in sexual selection, which helped to establish the centrality of sociobiology, as well as some of his later work on deceit in signalling, sex antagonistic genes, and imprinting. Trivers introduces each paper, setting them in their contemporary context, and critically evaluating them in the light of subsequent work and further developments. The result is a unique portrait of the intellectual development of sociobiology, with valuable insights for evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology.
368 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Robert Trivers
14 books109 followersRobert L. Trivers (born February 19, 1943, pronounced /ˈtrɪvɚz/) is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). Other areas in which he has made influential contributions include an adaptive view of self-deception (first described in 1976) and intragenomic conflict. Along with George C. Williams, Trivers is arguably one of the most influential evolutionary theorists alive today.
A 1961 graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, Trivers went to Harvard to study mathematics, but wound up studying U.S. history in preparation to become a lawyer. He received his A.B. degree in History on June 16, 1965 from Harvard University. He took a psychology class after suffering a breakdown, and was very unimpressed with the state of psychology. He was prevented from getting into Yale law school by his breakdown, and wound up with a job writing social science textbooks for children (never published, due in part to presenting evolution by natural selection as fact). This exposure to evolutionary theory led him to do graduate work with Ernst Mayr at Harvard 1968-1972. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology on June 15, 1972 also from Harvard University. He was on faculty at Harvard 1973-1978, then moved to UC Santa Cruz.
He met Huey P. Newton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in 1978 when Newton applied (while in prison) to do a reading course with him as part of a graduate degree in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Trivers and Newton became close friends: Newton was even godfather to one of Trivers' daughters. Trivers joined the Black Panther Party in 1979. Trivers and Newton published an analysis of the role of self-deception by the flight crew in the crash of Air Florida Flight 90.
Trivers was a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz 1978-1994. He is currently a Rutgers University notable faculty member. In the 2008-2009 academic year, he is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).
He wrote the original foreword to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and was recently awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".
—— From Wikipedia
A 1961 graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, Trivers went to Harvard to study mathematics, but wound up studying U.S. history in preparation to become a lawyer. He received his A.B. degree in History on June 16, 1965 from Harvard University. He took a psychology class after suffering a breakdown, and was very unimpressed with the state of psychology. He was prevented from getting into Yale law school by his breakdown, and wound up with a job writing social science textbooks for children (never published, due in part to presenting evolution by natural selection as fact). This exposure to evolutionary theory led him to do graduate work with Ernst Mayr at Harvard 1968-1972. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology on June 15, 1972 also from Harvard University. He was on faculty at Harvard 1973-1978, then moved to UC Santa Cruz.
He met Huey P. Newton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in 1978 when Newton applied (while in prison) to do a reading course with him as part of a graduate degree in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Trivers and Newton became close friends: Newton was even godfather to one of Trivers' daughters. Trivers joined the Black Panther Party in 1979. Trivers and Newton published an analysis of the role of self-deception by the flight crew in the crash of Air Florida Flight 90.
Trivers was a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz 1978-1994. He is currently a Rutgers University notable faculty member. In the 2008-2009 academic year, he is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).
He wrote the original foreword to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and was recently awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".
—— From Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 20, 2008
Among biological anthropologists and evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, Trivers is legendary. This book provides an excellent chance for the uninitiated to get right to the source.
Like any academic writing, Robert Trivers' papers are fairly technical and pointless to read unless you're truly interested and have some background in the subject. But the ones collected here are much more accessible than most. Along with the original papers, he provides extremely readable prologues and postscripts that tell the story of the how the papers came to be. No longer writing for writing for academic prestige, he's actually very accessible and his reputation as an original thinker is much deserved.
There's one section about self-delusion being regarded as virtue when it came to the Vietnam war that should have been required reading for everyone, pre-Iraq. I must have read it then and missed the significance, but reading it now was literally a sit-up-straight-and-pay-attention moment. Never has the line about repeating the mistakes of history been better illuminated. I'll have to look up the line and post it here.
Like any academic writing, Robert Trivers' papers are fairly technical and pointless to read unless you're truly interested and have some background in the subject. But the ones collected here are much more accessible than most. Along with the original papers, he provides extremely readable prologues and postscripts that tell the story of the how the papers came to be. No longer writing for writing for academic prestige, he's actually very accessible and his reputation as an original thinker is much deserved.
There's one section about self-delusion being regarded as virtue when it came to the Vietnam war that should have been required reading for everyone, pre-Iraq. I must have read it then and missed the significance, but reading it now was literally a sit-up-straight-and-pay-attention moment. Never has the line about repeating the mistakes of history been better illuminated. I'll have to look up the line and post it here.
January 10, 2021
- Natural Selection and Social Theory is a collection of Triver's most impactful papers, and all together, they're quite impressive. Trivers made foundational contributions to sociobiology and evolutionary biology and his papers are a joy to read.
- He writes eloquently on the mystery of cleaning symbiotes, small fish that dart fearlessly into the jaws of their hosts, cleaning off parasites to feed themselves. He has a beautiful way of demonstrating the puzzle he's aiming at: why don't hosts eat their cleaning symbiotes after they've been cleaned? Why have the host fish evolved sophisticated warning signals to communicate to cleaners when they'll close their mouth? Kin selection can explain kin-targeted altruism, but not altruism between two different species.
- He lays out a number of ecological factors that make this kind of reciprocal arrangement possible, and begins to sound quite like an economist in the process. Three factors are key: the repeated interactions between specific hosts/cleaners, the cost of searching for a new cleaner, and the benefits both parties get from the arrangement. All together, this has allowed natural selection to shape host and cleaner into arrangements that resemble that of a businessman and his long-time shoe-shiner.
- The book is replete with plausible explanations for many wondrous natural phenomena, from warning calls to weaning conflict to the logic of self-deception. Trivers mixes clever mental models and experimental evidence, and the end result is quite accessible, though when he gets deep into the thickets of selection in ant colonies, it gets tricky. The closer he sticks to model organisms and experimental evidence, the more firm his conclusions seem-- as he admits throughout, the sections on evolutionary psychology are more speculative, less amenable to firm experimental conclusion.
- This is a moderate weakness of the book, made less serious by its publication date. It has been about 40 years since Trivers did much of his work and in the last 10 or so, there has been a growing recognition by psychologists that much of the social psych opus was riddled with error (see: Replication Crisis). Though I'm no expert, I've kept up with the evo psych literature enough to know they have some similar problems. Most of the literature on female sexual preferences changing through a menstrual cycle seems to be noise. Digit ratios as markers of hormone exposure seem to be similarly shaky. Fluctuating Asymmetry seems to have held up a bit better, but I'm not up to date enough to know.
- So I would take much of the sections on human psychology as entertaining speculation, though the existence of self-deception seems obviously true. Overall 4/5.
- He writes eloquently on the mystery of cleaning symbiotes, small fish that dart fearlessly into the jaws of their hosts, cleaning off parasites to feed themselves. He has a beautiful way of demonstrating the puzzle he's aiming at: why don't hosts eat their cleaning symbiotes after they've been cleaned? Why have the host fish evolved sophisticated warning signals to communicate to cleaners when they'll close their mouth? Kin selection can explain kin-targeted altruism, but not altruism between two different species.
- He lays out a number of ecological factors that make this kind of reciprocal arrangement possible, and begins to sound quite like an economist in the process. Three factors are key: the repeated interactions between specific hosts/cleaners, the cost of searching for a new cleaner, and the benefits both parties get from the arrangement. All together, this has allowed natural selection to shape host and cleaner into arrangements that resemble that of a businessman and his long-time shoe-shiner.
- The book is replete with plausible explanations for many wondrous natural phenomena, from warning calls to weaning conflict to the logic of self-deception. Trivers mixes clever mental models and experimental evidence, and the end result is quite accessible, though when he gets deep into the thickets of selection in ant colonies, it gets tricky. The closer he sticks to model organisms and experimental evidence, the more firm his conclusions seem-- as he admits throughout, the sections on evolutionary psychology are more speculative, less amenable to firm experimental conclusion.
- This is a moderate weakness of the book, made less serious by its publication date. It has been about 40 years since Trivers did much of his work and in the last 10 or so, there has been a growing recognition by psychologists that much of the social psych opus was riddled with error (see: Replication Crisis). Though I'm no expert, I've kept up with the evo psych literature enough to know they have some similar problems. Most of the literature on female sexual preferences changing through a menstrual cycle seems to be noise. Digit ratios as markers of hormone exposure seem to be similarly shaky. Fluctuating Asymmetry seems to have held up a bit better, but I'm not up to date enough to know.
- So I would take much of the sections on human psychology as entertaining speculation, though the existence of self-deception seems obviously true. Overall 4/5.
March 25, 2024
What follows are summaries of some papers that were collected in this tome - that interested me about sexual selection and its mechanisms:
Reciprocal Altruism - Altruism that occurs between unrelated individuals when there will be repayment of the altruistic act in the future. Tit-for-tat or you scratch my back I scratch your back in biological terms. For instance, cleaner fish that feed on the parasite are alarmed by the cleaned host of incoming predators. Why not cheat? Selection will discriminate against the cheater if cheating has later adverse effects on his life which outweigh the benefit of not reciprocating- the host has parasites that are not going to be cleaned by cleaners because of the danger of being eaten. It seems plausible, furthermore, that the emotion of guilt has been selected for in humans partly to motivate the cheater to compensate for his misdeed and to behave reciprocally in the future, and thus to prevent the rupture of reciprocal relationships.
Parental investment and reproductive success - The relative investment of the two sexes in the offspring - this governs the operation of sexual selection. The male’s investment at copulation is trivial, or relatively minor, but the female’s investment may be associated with a year’s worth of reproductive effort. Thus, males chosen as extra-pair partners by females enjoy the possibility of a large immediate benefit (paternity of offspring who will be reared by the female with the help of another male) and similarly inflict a large cost on the “cuckolded” or genetically displaced male. These large potential selective effects would explain both a male’s eagerness to indulge in such extra-pair copulations and his anxiety that his mate might act similarly. The variance in reproductive success in Bateman's paper was analyzed by sex. It was his demonstration of higher variance in male than in female reproductive success and his argument linking this to low male parental investment that was key to understanding sexual selection. Thus, relative parental investment was expected to control relative variation in reproductive success by sex. Monogamous species (i.e., those with high male parental investment) would be expected to show similar variance in reproductive success in the two sexes, while species with greater male parental investment ought to show greater variance in female reproductive success.
Parental Investment Patterns - In the vast majority of species, the male’s only contribution to the survival of his offspring is his sex cells. In these species, female contribution exceeds males and by a large ratio. A male may invest in his offspring in several ways. He may provide his mate with food as in balloon flies and some other insects, some spiders, and some birds. He may find and defend a good place for the female to feed, lay eggs, or raise young, as in many birds. He may build a nest to receive the eggs, as in some fish. He may help the female lay the eggs, as in some parasitic birds. The male may also defend the female. He may brood the eggs, as in some birds, fish, frogs, and salamanders. He may help feed the young, protect them, provide learning opportunities, and so on, as in wolves and many monogamous birds. Finally, he may provide an indirect group benefit to the young (such as protection), as in many primates. The high male parental investment correlates with strong sex role reversal: females tend to be more brightly colored, more aggressive and larger than the males, and tend to court them and fight over them.
Short and long-term mating strategy - If there is any chance the female can raise the young, either alone or with the help of others, it would be to the male’s advantage to copulate with her. By this reasoning, one would expect males of monogamous species to retain some psychological traits consistent with promiscuous habits. A male would be selected to differentiate between a female he will only impregnate and a female with whom he will also raise young. Toward the former, he should be more eager for sex and less discriminating in the choice of sex partner than the female toward him, but toward the latter, he should be about as discriminating as she toward him.
The Trivers-Willard effect - Theory and data suggest that a male in good condition at the end of the period of parental investment is expected to outreproduce a sister in a similar condition, while she is expected to outreproduce him if both are in poor condition. Accordingly, natural selection should favor the parental ability to adjust the sex ratio of offspring produced according to the parental ability to invest. Data from mammals support the model: As maternal condition declines, the adult female tends to produce a lower ratio of males to females. When the parents invest the same in an average son as in an average daughter, natural selection favors a 50/50 sex ratio (ratio of males to females) at conception.
Parent-offspring conflict - Parent and offspring are expected to disagree over how long the period of parental investment should last, over the amount of parental investment that should be given, and over the altruistic and egoistic tendencies of the offspring as these tendencies affect other relatives. In addition, under certain conditions, parents and offspring are expected to disagree over the preferred sex of the potential offspring. In general, parent–offspring conflict is expected to increase during the period of parental care, and offspring are expected to employ psychological weapons to compete with their parents. Weaning conflict in baboons, for example, may last for weeks or months, involving daily competitive interactions and loud cries from the infant in a species otherwise strongly selected for silence.
Mate choice - Trivers demonstrates something fundamental, that systems of female choice will
naturally, evolve with a bias toward the interests of daughters. That is if sexual selection is operating adaptively from the female’s standpoint, those males breeding would have superior genes for their offspring than the average female genes themselves. If these superior genes improved daughter survival and/or reproduction, then an asexual mutant would have less than a twofold advantage each generation. Female choice gene harming daughters was inhibited in its spread compared to a female choice harming sons and the quantitative effect was appreciable.
Self-deception - The social nature of the human being could easily induce self-deception, that is, that we are selected to deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.
Genomic imprinting - Refers to a surprising discovery in the 1980s that in mammals (and flowering plants, such as corn) some genes in an individual have their pattern of expression affected by the sex of the parent that contributed the gene. Typically, there are paternally active genes, in which the copy from the father is active while the copy from the mother is inactive, and conversely, there are maternally active genes, in which the paternal copy is silenced. This difference does not reside in the DNA but is some kind of extragenetic piece of information (involving, e.g., how methylated the genes are).
Reciprocal Altruism - Altruism that occurs between unrelated individuals when there will be repayment of the altruistic act in the future. Tit-for-tat or you scratch my back I scratch your back in biological terms. For instance, cleaner fish that feed on the parasite are alarmed by the cleaned host of incoming predators. Why not cheat? Selection will discriminate against the cheater if cheating has later adverse effects on his life which outweigh the benefit of not reciprocating- the host has parasites that are not going to be cleaned by cleaners because of the danger of being eaten. It seems plausible, furthermore, that the emotion of guilt has been selected for in humans partly to motivate the cheater to compensate for his misdeed and to behave reciprocally in the future, and thus to prevent the rupture of reciprocal relationships.
Parental investment and reproductive success - The relative investment of the two sexes in the offspring - this governs the operation of sexual selection. The male’s investment at copulation is trivial, or relatively minor, but the female’s investment may be associated with a year’s worth of reproductive effort. Thus, males chosen as extra-pair partners by females enjoy the possibility of a large immediate benefit (paternity of offspring who will be reared by the female with the help of another male) and similarly inflict a large cost on the “cuckolded” or genetically displaced male. These large potential selective effects would explain both a male’s eagerness to indulge in such extra-pair copulations and his anxiety that his mate might act similarly. The variance in reproductive success in Bateman's paper was analyzed by sex. It was his demonstration of higher variance in male than in female reproductive success and his argument linking this to low male parental investment that was key to understanding sexual selection. Thus, relative parental investment was expected to control relative variation in reproductive success by sex. Monogamous species (i.e., those with high male parental investment) would be expected to show similar variance in reproductive success in the two sexes, while species with greater male parental investment ought to show greater variance in female reproductive success.
Parental Investment Patterns - In the vast majority of species, the male’s only contribution to the survival of his offspring is his sex cells. In these species, female contribution exceeds males and by a large ratio. A male may invest in his offspring in several ways. He may provide his mate with food as in balloon flies and some other insects, some spiders, and some birds. He may find and defend a good place for the female to feed, lay eggs, or raise young, as in many birds. He may build a nest to receive the eggs, as in some fish. He may help the female lay the eggs, as in some parasitic birds. The male may also defend the female. He may brood the eggs, as in some birds, fish, frogs, and salamanders. He may help feed the young, protect them, provide learning opportunities, and so on, as in wolves and many monogamous birds. Finally, he may provide an indirect group benefit to the young (such as protection), as in many primates. The high male parental investment correlates with strong sex role reversal: females tend to be more brightly colored, more aggressive and larger than the males, and tend to court them and fight over them.
Short and long-term mating strategy - If there is any chance the female can raise the young, either alone or with the help of others, it would be to the male’s advantage to copulate with her. By this reasoning, one would expect males of monogamous species to retain some psychological traits consistent with promiscuous habits. A male would be selected to differentiate between a female he will only impregnate and a female with whom he will also raise young. Toward the former, he should be more eager for sex and less discriminating in the choice of sex partner than the female toward him, but toward the latter, he should be about as discriminating as she toward him.
The Trivers-Willard effect - Theory and data suggest that a male in good condition at the end of the period of parental investment is expected to outreproduce a sister in a similar condition, while she is expected to outreproduce him if both are in poor condition. Accordingly, natural selection should favor the parental ability to adjust the sex ratio of offspring produced according to the parental ability to invest. Data from mammals support the model: As maternal condition declines, the adult female tends to produce a lower ratio of males to females. When the parents invest the same in an average son as in an average daughter, natural selection favors a 50/50 sex ratio (ratio of males to females) at conception.
Parent-offspring conflict - Parent and offspring are expected to disagree over how long the period of parental investment should last, over the amount of parental investment that should be given, and over the altruistic and egoistic tendencies of the offspring as these tendencies affect other relatives. In addition, under certain conditions, parents and offspring are expected to disagree over the preferred sex of the potential offspring. In general, parent–offspring conflict is expected to increase during the period of parental care, and offspring are expected to employ psychological weapons to compete with their parents. Weaning conflict in baboons, for example, may last for weeks or months, involving daily competitive interactions and loud cries from the infant in a species otherwise strongly selected for silence.
Mate choice - Trivers demonstrates something fundamental, that systems of female choice will
naturally, evolve with a bias toward the interests of daughters. That is if sexual selection is operating adaptively from the female’s standpoint, those males breeding would have superior genes for their offspring than the average female genes themselves. If these superior genes improved daughter survival and/or reproduction, then an asexual mutant would have less than a twofold advantage each generation. Female choice gene harming daughters was inhibited in its spread compared to a female choice harming sons and the quantitative effect was appreciable.
Self-deception - The social nature of the human being could easily induce self-deception, that is, that we are selected to deceive ourselves the better to deceive others.
Genomic imprinting - Refers to a surprising discovery in the 1980s that in mammals (and flowering plants, such as corn) some genes in an individual have their pattern of expression affected by the sex of the parent that contributed the gene. Typically, there are paternally active genes, in which the copy from the father is active while the copy from the mother is inactive, and conversely, there are maternally active genes, in which the paternal copy is silenced. This difference does not reside in the DNA but is some kind of extragenetic piece of information (involving, e.g., how methylated the genes are).
July 19, 2017
I have always love reading Trivers. He writes simply, compellingly and has no trouble including works that don't agree with his. In an age when writers routinely ignore information they don't like, that makes this man special!
November 4, 2017
A book with the title "selected papers" is bound to discourage readers of popular science, which is a shame as this book has a lot to offer to non-specialists (like me). Obviously, as a collection of papers, it can get quite dry, and there are occasional pages with maths (albeit quite simple fractions and equations), casual readers will probably skip some, as I did.
The range of papers is quite wide and some are more traditionally scientific than others, there's one for example on social insects full of evidence and testable predictions, and, on the other hand, one on self-deception which sometimes comes across as a philosophical opinion piece (or just common sense), expressed in scientific language. Finally, there are longish autobiographical introductions explaining how the author came to write the article, personal thoughts and criticisms, and a summary of developments on the topic after the article was written.
The "more scientific" papers are very enjoyable and also full of interesting ideas, they may appeal to laymen who have read a few books on evolution or readers with no background to science (who can also get acquainted with the cold and lucid prose of academic papers, the topics are inviting and accessible).
The "less scientific" pieces and especially the intros were even more enjoyable for me. The author is too intelligent and self-aware to fall into the trap of verbosity and pseudoscience (in the case of the psychological pieces) or self-indulgence (in the autobiographical parts). Even in the most personal parts, he always engages with the world, puts his situation into a wider frame lucidly and non-emotively, and uses his experience to understand the world and provide insights on how science (and scientific mindsets) work, what it takes to do proper research, and how humans and other animals are evolved to behave. The writing in the intros is also full of mischief, empathy, humour and quiet self-deprecation. Perhaps I should say, I've disliked autobiographical parts in almost all the books I've read, and especially in science.
Finally, for those not acquainted with the work of Trivers, the theme in all the papers is conflict (within the individual, within family members, etc) and when it arises, as well as the practical cost benefit to everything in life, it's all as far from escapism as reading can get, more than your average book on evolution.
The range of papers is quite wide and some are more traditionally scientific than others, there's one for example on social insects full of evidence and testable predictions, and, on the other hand, one on self-deception which sometimes comes across as a philosophical opinion piece (or just common sense), expressed in scientific language. Finally, there are longish autobiographical introductions explaining how the author came to write the article, personal thoughts and criticisms, and a summary of developments on the topic after the article was written.
The "more scientific" papers are very enjoyable and also full of interesting ideas, they may appeal to laymen who have read a few books on evolution or readers with no background to science (who can also get acquainted with the cold and lucid prose of academic papers, the topics are inviting and accessible).
The "less scientific" pieces and especially the intros were even more enjoyable for me. The author is too intelligent and self-aware to fall into the trap of verbosity and pseudoscience (in the case of the psychological pieces) or self-indulgence (in the autobiographical parts). Even in the most personal parts, he always engages with the world, puts his situation into a wider frame lucidly and non-emotively, and uses his experience to understand the world and provide insights on how science (and scientific mindsets) work, what it takes to do proper research, and how humans and other animals are evolved to behave. The writing in the intros is also full of mischief, empathy, humour and quiet self-deprecation. Perhaps I should say, I've disliked autobiographical parts in almost all the books I've read, and especially in science.
Finally, for those not acquainted with the work of Trivers, the theme in all the papers is conflict (within the individual, within family members, etc) and when it arises, as well as the practical cost benefit to everything in life, it's all as far from escapism as reading can get, more than your average book on evolution.
April 5, 2015
One of the essential and influential figures in evolutionary thinking. Trivers provides a surprisingly readable and personable account of the development of the intellectual theories for which he is famous. Indespensible as an evolutionary text, I found the introductions to each paper, a candid view into the mind of an intellectual one is usually not afforded in other academic texts.
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