The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)

Summary

Sign up for Quillette Ten Years of Ideas No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and the often-obscure political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But two weeks after the death of Robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin, not a single major news source has noticed his passing. This despite Trivers’s singular accomplishment of showing how the endlessly fascinating complexities of human relations are grounded in the wellsprings of complex life. And despite the fact that the man’s life was itself an object of fascination. Trivers was no ordinary academic. He was privileged in upbringing but louche in lifestyle, personally endearing but at times obstreperous and irresponsible, otherworldly brilliant but forehead-slappingly foolish. Robert Trivers. Photo supplied by the author. Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself. The fallout for science was vast. The fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology, and Darwinian social science are largely projects that test Trivers’s hypotheses. The ideas took pride of place in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976, and many other bestsellers in the next three decades such as Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal (1994) and my own How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002). In 2007 t...