Robert Trivers - Career

Career

Trivers was on faculty at Harvard from 1973 to 1978, and then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz where he was a faculty member 1978 to 1994. He is currently a Rutgers University notable faculty member. In the 2008–09 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

Trivers was recently awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".

Trivers wrote the original foreword to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene in which Trivers first proposed his adaptive theory of self-deception.

Trivers met Huey P. Newton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in 1978 when Newton applied while in prison to do a reading course with Trivers as part of a graduate degree in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Trivers and Newton became close friends: Newton was 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.

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has claimed that Trivers told him that "Nazi-like apologists as need to be confronted directly," during Dershowitz's highly publicized dispute with Professor Norman Finkelstein.

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