By BRIAN APPLEYARD - THE SUNDAY TIMES
Added: Sun, 18 Sep 2011 23:37:55 UTC

Lap dancers earn 30% more when they are ovulating. You are safer in a plane when the pilot hands over to the copilot. Men inadvertently touch women with their left hand... well, perhaps not all men. The one who tells us all this, Robert Trivers, does — but he’s not exactly normal.

In fact, he may be the most abnormal man I have ever interviewed. He is a petty thief with a high sex drive and an inordinate love of Jamaican women, a sucker for con artists and, according to one friend, completely “cuckoo”. On the other hand, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says he is “one of the great thinkers in the history of western thought”, and Richard Dawkins calls him “a uniquely brilliant scientist”.

“Thank you,” I begin, “for telling me about the lap dancers.” An ear-piercing, throaty, lived-in cackle comes from the other end of the line. “There are always little gems around. I’m glad you got a kick out of that one!”

Okay. Ovulating lap dancers make more money because they appear more attractive at that time of the month. You are safer being flown by a copilot because he will accept warnings from his superior, whereas a pilot often will not respond to the shrieks of terror from an inferior. Trivers inadvertently touches women with his left hand because his less conscious right brain — which controls the left hand — is subverting his more conscious, and therefore, more socially cautious, left brain. I could go on, but you get the picture — there’s something weird about the way we see the world. We suck up reality with our phenomenal sensory system, but then, as Trivers writes, “once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds”. Humans systematically deceive themselves and deceive others. “How does this evolve, and how much of it can you pin down? As you know, self-deception is just all over the goddam place.”

Fascinated for decades by this phenomenon — he first brought it up in an introduction to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in the 1970s — Trivers has finally produced the big book on the subject, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others. I would call it the standard text on the subject, but, frankly, it’s just too, well, Triversish to be called “standard”. He is definitely “gonzo” — a word coined by Hunter S Thompson to mean self-centred, eccentric, bizarre. Trivers approves the term with another deafening cackle.

The man and the career are equally gonzo. Born in 1943, he started out rather churchy — his mother wanted him to be a minister. He never quite lost the religion. He professes himself an agnostic, regards atheism as irrational and says the Lord’s prayer every day. “I meditate and pray, yeah. As for this enormous universe and how it started, that’s way beyond my capacity to say anything of value, and it’s way beyond the capacity of humans to penetrate at the moment. All the alternative explanations you hear are equally absurd to me. The whole damn thing is incredible.”

At 13, he discovered maths and astronomy. Struck by the order and beauty of these disciplines, he taught himself calculus. Later, however, he saw maths as “hopelessly unconnected with reality at the moment”, and he had no talent for physics. “So I said to myself, quite literally, I will not deal with truth. I will deal with justice. And justice was becoming a lawyer and fighting the good fight of the 1960s.”

He was advised to study American history, which turned out to be his first contact with the phenomenon that was to dominate his later years — self-deception. “It was one great exercise in self-deception. It was all about why we were the greatest nation that ever existed, and the greatest people that ever stood on the earth.”

When Trivers was 21, he had a mental breakdown — he suffers from bipolar disorder. It was a painful experience and, at first, he said he would kill himself if it happened again. Later, he changed his mind and made a list of 10 people he would kill instead.

Recovering, he returned to Harvard to take a psychology course. He rejected that subject as “not a true science, just a series of competing arbitrary guesses at what was important in human development”. Unable, because of the breakdown, to get into his favoured law schools, he ended up learning biology and all about Darwin. “Then I realised, well, Jesus Christ, this is the foundation of psychology, and by logic it would have to be.”

With this insight, he became one of the most influential thinkers of our time, a place he finally claimed with the publication of five papers in the early 1970s. Prior to Trivers, the assumption was that the human organism was a product of Darwinian evolution (nature), but that its behaviour was socially caused (nurture). But Trivers created evolutionary psychology, a way of seeing human behaviour — altruism, jealousy, sexual conduct — in Darwinian terms.

He said he would kill himself. Later, he changed his mind and made a list of 10 people he would kill instead

The gene was back at the centre of things, and two books appeared to popularise the idea. Both EO Wilson, with Sociobiology in 1975, and Richard Dawkins, with The Selfish Gene in 1976, admitted they were building on Trivers’s papers. Wilson’s book formally established EP as a new basis of psychology, a fact that still rankles with Trivers. “Wilson invented a name. He sure did not invent a field, he gave a name to it.”

Sociobiology — or whatever you want to call it — was politically controversial. The left hated it because it seemed to consign people to their place in society because of their genes, and even seemed to evoke the racial determinism of the Nazis. Wilson took the heat from the angry students, but Trivers had, by then, gone off to California.

There he became a member of the Black Panthers after teaming up with Huey P Newton, its chairman. Together, bizarrely, they published an analysis of the self-deception in the cockpit that led to the crash soon after takeoff of an Air Florida flight from Washington to Fort Lauderdale in 1982. Seventy-eight people died because the pilot wouldn’t pay any attention to the warnings of the copilot.

Trivers then decided to conquer genetics. “I said, stupidly, I would whip genetics into shape in three to five years. Well, you know what, you don’t whip genetics into shape, it whips you into shape. It took 15 years.”

Anyway, back in the late 1960s, in the Harvard days, he was sent to Jamaica to study lizards; it was a life-changing trip. “I took one look at the women and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it... It was really a bias towards darker-skinned women that goes way back to childhood. I later discovered that many men like me in America had a bias towards darker-skinned women, and they often ended up in some other place. I felt liberated in Jamaica...” He now has four Jamaican children and two Jamaican ex-wives.

One other biographical oddity, also detailed at length in the book, is his apparently subconscious penchant for petty thievery. “There’s been nothing I can do about it, it’s so embarrassing.” He picks up keys, lighters, pens, matches, usually useful things. He even steals from himself — chalk, pens and pencils from work.

“Perhaps,” he writes, “because the trait is so unconscious, it appears to have a life of its own and often seems to act directly against my own self-interests.” If you are thinking of having him round to dinner, don’t. And so, after he had sort of whipped genetics into shape with his book Genes in Conflict, Trivers finally got back to deceit about five years ago. We all know that animals deceive to survive. Humans do the same unthinkingly. The reason the lap dancer earns more is because, when ovulating, there are subtle changes that make her body appear more symmetrical, and her waist-hip ratio is slightly reduced. Men like this. Ovulating women also slag off the looks of other women more than at any other time in the month. They like darker, less hairy men, too, if that’s any help.

There is, however, a twist with humans. Thanks to our giant brains, deception evolves to become self-deception. This is, Trivers says, an evolutionary bonus. “It is better for us to deceive ourselves, because we are less likely to give signals when we deceive others... But also, so much of our self-deception is about self-inflation — you know, you are better-looking than you are, you are smarter than you are and so on — and for that again, if we believe this self-image, the self-image projects better.”

Once, Trivers was walking down a street, chatting up a much younger woman. Then he noticed an old, ugly man marching along beside them. It was, of course, Trivers, self-inflated, self-deceived. It turns out the most intelligent people are also the best self-deceivers — another cackle from Trivers when he tells me this.

There’s hole in all of this: if we don’t know how our minds emerge from our brains — and we don’t — then all evolutionary psychology is on shaky foundations. But never mind. If you want to know what scientists are thinking these days, then this is your book, and gonzo, cackling, petty-thieving Trivers is your man.  
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