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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Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The Supreme Court would have pleased me more if they had concerned themselves about enforcing the compulsory education provisions for Negroes in the South as is done for white children. The next ten years would be better spent in appointing truant officers and looking after conditions in the homes from which the children come. Use to the limit what we already have.”
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“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
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“The study of tools as well as of books should have a place in the public schools. Tools, machinery, and the implements of the farm should be made familiar to every boy, and suitable industrial education should be furnished for every girl.”
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