33 Trivers in action
Robert Trivers was finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard when I arrived, and he became an Assistant Professor there before I finished. We played squash frequently, but our academic interests differed. Bob was rapidly becoming a super-star in sociobiology – a hot field but one of little interest to me. Nevertheless, I learned a lot by watching Bob in action at Harvard. He was creative, insightful, brash, wild, and often funny.
33.1 How to deflate a criticism
Ernest Williams, Bob’s and my Ph.D. adviser, ran a bi-weekly ‘Anolis symposium’ in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Students, postdocs, and visitors gave informal talks and received feedback, which was sometimes unpleasantly negative.
One night Bob talked about his research with the Jamaican ‘giant’ anole (Anolis garmani). These anoles are sexually dimorphic in size; males are much larger than females. Bob wanted to test whether large males out compete small males for mates. If so, ‘sexual selection’ would favor large males and explain the evolution of the observed size dimorphism.
In Jamaica Bob and his assistants captured copulating pairs and measured the body sizes of both the male and female. From such data and from knowing the size distribution of all males in the population, Bob could determine whether large males mated more often than would be expected by chance, thereby promoting selection for large male size. This was an innovative field study.
Bob mentioned that he’d twice caputured pairs in copulo - but both were males, with the larger individual on top! He suggested that a smaller male should put up with an occasional ‘buggery,’ as this would enable it to live in what was presumably a high quality territory (or perhaps enable it to ‘inherit’ the territory and its resident females when the big amd dominant male died). [NOTE: small males do resemble females in size and color.]
Someone objected that Bob was speculating wildly, given that he had seen this only twice. Bob responded:
“If you see something once, it’s an anecdote. If you see something twice, it’s a Law of Nature.”
End of discussion! And I’ve ‘borrowed’ (always with attribution) Bob’s show-stopping rebuttal several times over the decades.
33.2 How to turn attack back on an attacker
Sometime thereafter, Robert K. Selander, a distinguished evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, gave a departmental seminar at Harvard. Trivers hosted a dinner party for Selander.
Seated in the living room on a couch or on comfortable chairs were Selander, Ernst Mayr, Ernest Williams, and Bryan Patterson (a distinguished paleontologist, and the son of Col. Patterson of man eaters of Tsavo fame). Acting professorial as befit their elevated self-images, these four scholars were debating a newly discovered hominid fossil from Africa (’EastRudolph 1470’.) At the same time, Bob and all of us grad students were off in the kitchen, drinking beer and likely smoking joints.
When Bob walked into the living room, Mayr looked up and asked,
“Bob, we would like you to share with our distinguished guest your insights concerning the paleontological significance of ‘EastRudolph 1470’.”
Mayr knew full well that Bob knew little or nothing about early hominid evolution, so he was just having fun at Bob’s expense.
Without hesitating, Bob answered along these lines.
“Thank you Professor Mayr for this opportunity to share my profound insights into this important new fossil. I want our distinguished guest to appreciate that everything I know about hominid paleontology I have learned right here at Harvard University from these distinguished faculty.”
At that point, Mayr began backpedaling, trying to keep Bob from demonstrating how little he had learned from Harvard’s distinguished faculty.
This verbal exchange penetrated the smoke in the kitchen. Bob had quickly flipped a disadvantage into an advantage, and did so humorously and with style. Few people have such a gift.
33.3 How Ray defended himself against Trivers
At Harvard, one’s thesis defense consisted of being questioned by the committee. My thesis committee consited of Bob, Richard Taylor, and Ernest Williams.
Bob and I played squash the day before my defense. I failed to restrain my competitive nature, and I beat him.
As we walked back to the Museum, Bob threatened, “You will pass your defense tomorrow over my dead body.”
Once in the Museum, I searched for Russell Mittermeier, a fellow graduate student, and borrowed a 5’ long spear from Brazil.
My thesis defense was conducted in a small room in the Biology Labs. When I walked into the room, Williams was sitting at the opposite end of a long wooden table, Taylor was to my left, and Trivers was to my right. I sat down and plopped the spear loudly on the table and pointed the spear tip at Bob.
Williams looked hard at me and pointedly asked,
“What is that?”
I responded,
“Well, sir, Professor Trivers informed me that I would pass this exam over his dead body, and I intend to take him up on it.’
Williams blustered,
“Out! Out! Never in the history of Harvard University has a Professor been threatened! Get that spear out!”
To the best of my memory, the spear stayed in front of me, and Bob was uncharacteristically quiet. I suspect that my entire self-defense took at most five minutes.
I remember these events in part because they were funny. More importantly, I was lucky to watch a special mind in action. Bob was not the only special mind I encountered at Harvard, as the ecology and evolution group at the time had a remarkable collection of graduate students and postdocs (Robert Bakker, Gary Belovsky, Jerry Coyne, Paul Hertz, Ross Kiester, Russ Lande, Jane Lubchenco, Joan Roughgarden, Tom Schoener). What a stimulating and exciting place to be a graduate student.