Education
Trivers graduated from Phillips Academy in 1961 and intended to study mathematics at Harvard University. However, he ended studying American history, preparing to become a lawyer. He graduated in 1965. 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 so took a job writing social science textbooks for children that were never published. According to The Guardian's Andrew Brown, the breakdown occurred because Trivers stayed up "all night, night after night" reading Ludwig Wittgenstein. This landed him in a hospital where he was "treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs" and, as part of his therapy, he took art classes. He then got a job illustrating and later writing a "series of textbooks for high schools".
While recovering, he took courses in art, and was hired to illustrate, and then to write, a series of textbooks for high schools. Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology.
This exposure to evolutionary theory led him to do graduate work with Ernst Mayr at Harvard from 1968 to 1972. He earned his Ph.D. in biology on June 15, 1972, also from Harvard. The second half of his first major paper, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" was published in 1971.
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