picture: The Lovers, Remedios Varo
from this book review:
But Robert Trivers was not interested in biology; he wanted to be a lawyer, and it would take a tragic breakdown (a mania that took the form of staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and finally collapsing) to bring him closer to the animal world. [...]
His mentor was Bill Drury, an ornithologist whom the young Trivers learned to love and revere. "Bill and I were walking in the woods one day," Trivers once told a reporter, "and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of ten people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said, 'Can I add three names to that list?' That was his only comment." With Drury's encouragement, Trivers signed up for a doctorate in zoology armed with a plan to study monkeys. But his adviser was a herpetologist, and pointed Trivers to Jamaica and lizards instead. "When we flew to Jamaica," Trivers remembers, "I took one look at the women and one look at the island and decided to become a lizard man if that's what it took to go back there." Thus was born the career of the man who would pretend to explain altruism.
