Quotes from Robert Trivers

The great sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly "Oh master," he was asked, "what is the most difficult thing to do?" "To know thyself", he replied. "And the easiest?" "To give advice to others.

However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don't.

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.

A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge - that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she might be.

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?

Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status

I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us

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.

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.

A kind of bias I share says that if a human thinks symmetry is important it may or may not be, but if a bird thinks symmetry is important, it very likely is!

Denial is apt to be quicker than the truth, and so are well-rehearsed lies.