Wild Life Quotes

“My favorite joke of his occurred when George was telling me about the joys of grandfatherhood. “If I could have figured out how to have grandchildren without having children first, I would have done so.” Later on, I knew just what he meant – high relatedness, no work. Or as Melvin Newton (Huey’s brother) once put it, “You can serve them ice cream for breakfast, what do you care?”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“I was once watching a herring gull through binoculars side by side with Bill. In those days, a herring gull could not scratch itself without one of us asking why natural selection favored that behavior. In any case, I offered as an explanation for the ongoing gull behavior something that was nonfunctional and suggested that the animal was not capable of acting in its own self-interest. Bill said quietly, “Never assume the animal you are studying is as stupid as the one studying it.” I remember looking sideways at him and saying to myself “Yes sir! I like this person. I can learn from him.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“Prior to my breakdown I went through a 5 week manic phase, with increasing mental excitation, decreasing sleep, and a near certainty that I wa sthe first person to actually understand what Ludwig Wittgenstein was actually saying.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

“My Jamaican symmetry project is twenty years old, and we have now shown that knee symmetry is a key variable in sprinting success; we can use it to predict sprinting success fourteen years into the future, and also to predict which of Jamaica’s elite sprinters are the very best.”
― Robert Trivers, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist