1888: The How, The Why

A live recording of our educational podcast The Grammar of Science and Technology with Dr. Robert Trivers. Moderated by Dr. Terence Burnham. Robert Trivers is an evolutionary biologist who concentrates on social theory based on natural selection, and on evolutionary genetics—the twin backbones of biology. Early work concentrated on reciprocal altruism, the evolution of sex differences, the sex ratio at birth, parent-offspring conflict, kinship and sex ratio in social insects and the theory that self-deception evolves in the service of deceit. Later he showed that systems of female choice naturally evolve with a bias toward daughters. He then devoted fifteen years of his life (with Austin Burt) to reviewing the vast topic of selfish genetic elements in all species (except bacteria and viruses). These are genes that do not benefit the individual with the genes but spread because they reproduce faster within the individual. He recently published in 2011 Deceit and Self-deception—Fooling Yourself the Better to F