[2] Trivers studied evolutionary theory with Ernst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, when he earned his PhD in biology.
Arguably his most important paper, it arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by his reading a 1948 paper by Angus Bateman (“Intra-sexual selection in Drosophila”) which demonstrated that sex differences in the intensity of selection in fruit flies were based on their ability to obtain mates.
[5] The primary insight of Trivers was that the key variable underlying the evolution of sex differences across species was relative parental investment in offspring.
[citation needed] Trivers was awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for "his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation".
"[12] In 2015, Rutgers University suspended Trivers with pay as part of an ongoing dispute regarding a class on "Human Aggression" the Anthropology department had assigned to him.
It is no coincidence that E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene were published in 1975 and 1976 respectively, just a few years after Trivers's seminal papers.
Each of these books is based in large part on Trivers's ideas and the explosion of research they inspired, involving dozens of animal species, mathematical and computer modeling, and human social and cognitive psychology.Trivers has two Jamaican ex-wives, five children, and eight grandchildren as of 2016.