{"id":3892,"date":"2014-02-24T07:34:56","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T12:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3892"},"modified":"2014-02-24T07:37:51","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T12:37:51","slug":"robert-trivers-and-rutgers-one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2014\/02\/24\/human-nature\/robert-trivers-and-rutgers-one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Trivers and Rutgers: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Trivers<\/a> is a giant in the field of evolutionary biology.\u00a0 The brilliance of his work has not faded over time, and has been in a field that is highly relevant to us all.\u00a0 He has greatly enhanced our ability to understand ourselves.\u00a0 It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of his work.\u00a0 I just started reading a copy of novelist\u00a0Ian McEwan’s<\/a> Enduring Love<\/em>, and was amazed to find artifacts of Trivers’ famous parental investment theory<\/a> in the opening chapters!\u00a0 If he were Japanese, the man would probably be declared\u00a0one of the country’s\u00a0living national treasures.\u00a0 Not here, though.\u00a0 Here it seems his reward is coming in the form of a constant stream of abuse from the Rutgers administration.<\/p>\n

I posted a bit about Trivers <\/a>last year.\u00a0 He had accused one of his graduate students of fraud in a scientific paper.\u00a0 One of his colleagues who supported the alleged fraudster claimed that Trivers “frightened him in his office.”\u00a0 For that he was banned from campus.\u00a0 Now we learn he has aroused the ire of the Rutgers bureaucrats yet again.\u00a0 Apparently Trivers objected to teaching a course <\/a>on “Human Aggression,” claiming that he lacked expertise in the subject.\u00a0 According to Kelly Heyboer <\/a>of the New Jersey Star-Ledger<\/em>, when forced to teach it anyway, “Trivers told students he would do his best to learn the subject with the students and teach the class with the help of a guest lecturer.”\u00a0 For this, he was suspended.\u00a0 According to Trivers, top university officials refused to even meet with him to discuss the subject.<\/p>\n

Can anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last 50 years possibly fail to understand why someone like Trivers would object to teaching a class on “Human Aggression” in the context of evolutionary biology?\u00a0 It has been the subject of furious ideological battles ever since Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz’ <\/a>publication of On Aggression<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Forcing a scientist of Trivers’ stature to teach a course on the subject amounts to setting him up as a target for the zealots on both sides of the ideological barricades.\u00a0 It is hard to explain such an act by Rutgers as other than either a malicious provocation or stupidity.<\/p>\n

I admire Trivers for fighting back.\u00a0 As a professor with tenure nearing the end of his career, at least he’s in a position where he can<\/em> fight back.\u00a0 If you’ve ever seen the curriculum vitae<\/em> of a young, tenure track assistant professor at a major university, you know the competition they face is fierce.\u00a0 Without a gazillion publications, citations, invited talks, outside activities, prestigious awards, etc., they don’t even stand a chance.\u00a0 For them, resistance to these bullies would be suicidal.\u00a0 Trivers isn’t such an easy mark.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s stunning to me that Rutgers can get away with this kind of abuse, and that it passes almost unnoticed, not only in the popular media, but in the science journals and websites as well.\u00a0 Where are the other greats in the field?\u00a0 Apparently, they “just don’t want to get involved.”\u00a0 Trivers may not be the easiest man to get along with, but he deserves better.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Trivers is a giant in the field of evolutionary biology.\u00a0 The brilliance of his work has not faded over time, and has been in a field that is highly relevant to us all.\u00a0 He has greatly enhanced our ability to understand ourselves.\u00a0 It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of his work.\u00a0 I just started … Continue reading “Robert Trivers and Rutgers: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[112,105,232,28,187],"tags":[249,250],"class_list":["post-3892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-genetics","category-human-nature","category-kin-selection","tag-robert-trivers","tag-rutgers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-10M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3895,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3892\/revisions\/3895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}