Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist

237 Pages·2015·2.36 MB·English

by  Robert Trivers

WILD LIFE
Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist
Robert Trivers
Biosocial Research
New Brunswick, New Jersey
In memory of my teacher
William H. Drury, Jr.
Contents
Preface: Studying Life and Living It
Chapter 1: From Mathematics to Viet Nam War Vet to Unemployed
Chapter 2: Bill Drury, the Man Who Taught Me How to Think
Chapter 3: Memories of Ernst Mayr
Chapter 4: I Become a Lizard Man in Jamaica
Chapter 5: Tried for Assault Occasioning Bodily Harm
Chapter 6: The Death of Flo
Chapter 7: Robbed at Gunpoint in East Kingston
Chapter 8: Glenroy Ramsey: Master Lizard Catcher
Chapter 9: Jamaican Murders Most Frequent and Most Foul
Chapter 10: The Murder of James ‘Be-be’ Bent
Chapter 11: Hanging with Huey
Chapter 12: Under Arrest
Chapter 13: Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small
Chapter 14: Ambivalence About Jamaica
Chapter 15: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Acknowledgements
About the Author
Preface
Studying Life and Living It
For a scientist there is always studying life and living it, and I have never
wanted the one to overwhelm the other. Yet that is exactly what a life devoted to
science will tempt you into – a life of studying and, otherwise, not much living.
Yes, you may have a family and a few good friends, but most scientists embrace
a sedentary life, often solitary and intensely internal. You concentrate on
experiments and theory and perpetual reading. Your small area of study is the
focus of your life, and it is a focus you share with only a few others. Of course,
that is not to say you don’t have your chances for exciting social interaction.
Deep in the bowels of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, with row
after row of specimens along long, dark corridors, occasionally a beetle
specialist turns, grabs a gall midge freak, and for one wild moment there is both
socio-sexual congress and a melding of lives based on biology itself. He will
study beetles, she gall midges, side by side around the world. No competition,
only complementation.
But this kind of life never appealed to me. I was an out-breeder, certainly by
nature, and I was also raised in a diplomat’s home. Foreign countries and
languages were part of my upbringing. Since my father served in Europe, I had
walked through more cathedrals, museums and art galleries than were healthy
for any child, and I had no interest whatsoever in European culture, nor in the
academic disciplines based on them. But I did know five foreign languages and
enjoyed meeting people in their own land, speaking their language, learning
about their area of expertise.
When I finally found my intellectual home in evolutionary biology, it offered
me exactly the right kind of foreign travel – in the rural, the bush, the exotic, and
the wild. Third world, not first. Evolutionary biology would take me around the
world. And it would show me how to carve knowledge from everything I
experienced in these travels with a single, very general logic – what would
natural selection favor? How would one best survive and reproduce in these
conditions? In short, I signed on to a system of thought that allowed me to study
life and live it, sometimes very intensively.
I was twenty-two when I learned evolutionary logic, twenty-three when I
began studying birds seriously, and twenty-four when I headed on my first trip to
the wild. I was single and male. I was eager to see what lay abroad. My biology
teacher was an arctic man so that is where I first went. But I did so only once. I
knew the moment I left the arctic that I was never coming back – too cold, too
harsh, too little life, and, yes, probably too limited a social life. Next time, I
knew, I was going south. As it turned out, I was going to Jamaica, where I have
now lived for eighteen years of my life.
I have also studied wildlife (and human life) in Haiti, India, Kenya, Tanzania,
Panama, Barbados, and Senegal. But it is Jamaica that has, in some sense, been
every bit as much my intellectual home as is evolutionary biology. I both joined
the island (acquired land) and “stole women off the island” as the Jamaican
expression goes. My five children are American/Jamaican. I could easily have
gone the West African route, as many evolutionary biologists of the era did. I
have often wondered how different my life’s trajectory would have been if I had.
Certainly, going the Jamaican route did not shield me from exposure to violence.
In evolutionary terms, violence is associated with large, immediate effects on
survival. Jamaica, in turn, is a violent society. Of course, I didn't know this when
I made the decision to first do my fieldwork there. In fact, I was surprised to
meet a German sociologist in 1970 who was studying violence in Jamaica. I
thought, wow, a German is willing to travel all this distance to study violence?
Must be something interesting going on. He was incredulous. Did I not know
that Jamaica was one of the most dangerous societies in the world? News to me.
But Jamaica, he assured me, had one of the highest murder rates in the world per
capita. It still does.
I think it is fair to say that my decades of fieldwork, especially in Jamaica but
also in Panama (and even Amsterdam), have involved more near-death
experiences than that of most scientists. I have been involved in robberies at
gunpoint and at knifepoint, an armed home invasion, and a fight that led to my
being charged with assault. I have also nearly catapulted myself off of heights
too great to ensure survival. You might call me unlucky, but I prefer to say that
the scimitar of natural selection has often been raised high above my head. In the
pages that follow, I have tried to capture this unusual dimension of my
experiences where living life and studying it have merged into one another under
extreme conditions – precisely those conditions expected to reveal the
underlying dynamics of evolution most clearly.
My near-death experiences have made up one very important way in which I
have managed not to forgo living life while studying it. But these pages contain
much more than just the violent characters and episodes I have met with. I have
also met extraordinary minds along the way, from my unheralded teacher Bill
Drury, to the legendary evolutionist Ernst Mayr, to the Minister of Defense of
the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton (both brilliant and dangerous), among
numerous others. I have tried to give something here of the flavor of these
extraordinary humans, and of what it meant to know them.
And finally I have tried to connect my life to members of other animal
species, trying to understand them from the inside and even to talk to them in
their own languages. In the pages that follow I have woven in, wherever
relevant, these distant but often surprisingly familiar viewpoints and
communications – that of birds and monkeys, lizards and chimpanzees.
This mixture of recollections might strike some as strange. Near-death
experiences. Great human minds. The minds and behaviors of other animals. To
me, though, it is the only mixture of recollections that could give a sense of how
I have lived life and studied it – and of how these endeavors have so often
become indistinguishable from one another. This is my life as an evolutionary
biologist – animals, fellow evolutionists, and near-death experiences all in one.
Chapter 1
From Mathematics to Viet Nam War Vet to
Unemployed
When I was twelve years old I knew I wanted to be a scientist because it was
obvious upon inspection (this was 1955) that none of the other intellectual areas
– history, religion, English literature or the social so-called sciences – provided
much hope of actual, sustained intellectual advance. I was at first attracted to
astronomy, the vastness and beauty of space and the billions of years it had been
forming. So much more exciting and awe-inspiring than the seven-day metaphor
of the Bible. I got a telescope, read Hoyle’s standard Astronomy text and came
up with the bi-stellar hypothesis for the origin of the solar system.
I liked that astronomy was a science. These people were not fooling around.
They measured things and they did so carefully. They tested assertions against
data, and were capable of changing either, and they continually attempted to
improve the precision of their measurements. When Einstein’s theory that
gravity bent light was tested by the apparent change in position of a star during
an eclipse we had dramatic evidence, measured with great precision, of exactly
how much that bend was. But astronomy was not a discipline you could pursue
in the eighth grade, so I soon turned to mathematics.
My father happened to have a large number of math books and out of sheer
boredom one day I picked out one entitled “Differential Calculus.” I was thirteen
and it took me two months to master the book. It then took me two more to
master the book next to it, “Integral Calculus.” It was a thrill to see that the
algebra I knew could generate fields with real predictive and analytic power – it
was now trivial to measure the area under a complex curve. That was only part
of the beauty of mathematics, and its scientific twin: you could learn the whole
thing from the bottom up. That is, if you were willing to put in the time and the
effort. Mathematical proofs were entirely explicit, every variable and every
transformation exactly described. Scientific experiments, in turn, were described
so others could attempt to replicate them exactly to see if duplicate results were
achieved.
I mastered other corners of mathematics, mainly number theory, infinite,
irrational, limit theory, and so on. I entered Harvard as a sophomore in pure
mathematics, but halfway through the year I saw the end of the whole enterprise
and it was nowhere I wanted to be – at best, producing work with solid utility
but far delayed, perhaps by the year 2250, but of no immediate use. Physics was
for me no better, because, for one thing, I had no physical intuition at all. When
they raised an object off the ground and told us they had thereby given it
“negative energy” I headed for the door. And of chemistry and biology I knew
nothing, having never taken a course in either at any level.
So I decided to give up truth for justice and become a lawyer. I would fight
the good fights – early ‘60s civil rights, poverty law, criminal law where you
hoped the criminal was not too guilty, and so on. I asked people what you
studied if you wished to pursue law and they said there was no such thing as
“pre-law” at Harvard, so I best study the history of the United States. I declared
that as my major and spent the next years learning about the Federalist papers,
the Constitution, Supreme Court Decisions, that kind of thing.
I developed an almost immediate distaste for the subject because it was
obvious from the outset that U.S. history, as it was studied then, was not so
much an intellectual discipline as an exercise in self-deception. The major
question U.S. historians were tackling at that time was: why are we the greatest
society ever created and the greatest people ever to stride the face of the earth?
The major competing theories were answers to this question. The benefits of
having a society designed by upper-class Englishmen was one such theory, as
were the benefits of an ever-receding frontier – that is, the increasing
extermination of Amerindians from East Coast to West. The larger field of
history was somewhat more interesting but still consisted of stories from the
past, inevitably biased and lacking critical information – and I saw little hope of
correcting either defect.
In any case, April of 1964, my junior year at Harvard, I suffered a mental
breakdown and was hospitalized for two and a half months. Prior to the
breakdown I went through a five week manic phase, with increasing mental
excitation, decreasing sleep, and near certainty that I was the first person to
understand what Ludwig Wittgenstein was actually saying, even though this was
the first philosophy course I was auditing. I remember very little else from the
manic phase except that I started trying self-hypnosis to put myself to sleep. It
did not work and lack of sleep is what brings on a full breakdown. Finally one
night my friends, who had become increasingly concerned, deposited me at the
Harvard Infirmary where I could not answer the elementary question, “Who are
you?” “A pregnant woman?” “A new-born baby?” But not, “A thoroughly
confused Harvard Junior.”
Then came eleven weeks of self-admitted incarceration at three hospitals for
treatment of my psychosis. Incarceration – even when voluntary and in a
hospital – is never fun. You are locked in, no longer permitted to move about as
you like. But thank God by that time the biochemists had come up with
compounds that would knock the psychosis right out of you, and then hold it
down afterwards to give you time to sleep and recover. After my final release in
mid-June I spent the summer reading novels, one a day, and I have always
blessed novelists since that summer. As a scientist, I scarcely read all the science
I was supposed to, never mind a novel, but that summer novels allowed me to
leave my own life and dwell in the lives of others while my own self relaxed and
repaired.
Harvard readmitted me in the fall. I spent most of that semester playing gin
rummy all night long – in other words, still resting my brain. But I also decided
to take a course in psychology, since my mental breakdown suggested it might
be a useful subject to know. It soon became apparent that psychology was not
yet a science, but rather a set of competing guesses about what was important in
human development – stimulus-response learning, the Freudian system, or social
psychology. None were integrated with each other, and none could form the
basis for an actual science of psychology, so I paid no attention to this subject.
The two law schools I had applied to – alleged to be among the most
progressive – turned me down, so I graduated with a degree in a field I had little
respect for and no intention of pursuing. I returned home to live with my parents,
unemployed, with hopes of finding a job. But first there was the matter of the
draft.