Natural Selection and Social Theory Evolution and Cognition

General Editor: Stephen Stich, Rutgers University

Published in the Series

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group

Adaptive Thinking Gerd Gigerenzer

Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers Robert Trivers Natural Selection and Social Theory ሆህሄ

Selected Papers of Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers

1 2002 3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trivers, Robert. Natural selection and social theory : selected papers of Robert Trivers / by Robert Trivers. p. cm.—(Evolution and cognition) A collection of 10 papers, 5 published in scholarly journals between 1971–1976 and 5 between 1982–2000. Reciprocal altruism—Parental investment and reproductive success—The Trivers-Willard effect—Parent-offspring conﬂict—Haplodiploidy and the social insects —Size and reproductive success in a lizard—Selecting good genes for daughters— Self-deception in service of deceit—Genomic imprinting—Fluctuating asymmetry and 2nd:4th digit ratio in children. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513061-8; 0-19-513062-6 (pbk.) 1. Sociobiology. 2. Evolution (Biology) 3. Social evolution in animals. I. Title. II. Series. GN365.9.T762002 304.5—dc21 2001036767

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper For my mother, Mildred Raynolds Trivers, author of seven children and seven books of poetry, born July 4, 1912

with love PREFACE

This book is a collection of some of my scientific papers, along with accounts of how they were written and short postscripts that attempt to bring the reader up-to-date. I have naturally concentrated on my early papers, the five between 1971 and 1976 that had such a strong influence. In addition to these I have included an empirical paper on lizard size and reproductive success. I have also included a paper (with Jon Seger) showing a bias in female choice toward the interests of daughters, a widely neglected paper that I hope this volume will help resurrect. My thinking on self-deception is scattered in various places, including chapter 16 of my book Social Evo- lution. Here I reproduce a paper with Huey Newton analyzing the contri- bution of self-deception to the crash of an airplane, along with a paper just published that summarizes my current understanding of the subject. Since finishing my book on Social Evolution in 1985, I have largely been occupied trying to understand the genetics and evolution of selfish genetic elements, a vast subject from which I reproduce here only a chapter with Austin Burt on genomic imprinting, itself one of the most interesting discoveries in mammalian genetics in the past twenty years. I close with a brief summary of the results of the only long-term study of fluctuating asymmetry (and the 2nd : 4th digit ratio) in humans. The postscripts are meant to lead the reader to some useful work published after the paper itself. I have not kept up in depth with many of these topics, but when I know of important work I try to draw the reader’s attention to it, and I also try to give a set of recent references that can quickly lead the reader to the larger subject. Having said this, I must emphasize that with modern computer-driven search engines (such as Web of Science) the interested reader has only to find the “cited reference search” and type in the reference to my paper, and the computer will spew out very recent references on the topic. viii PREFACE

Acknowledgments

This book was completed under a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fel- lowship, as well a Smithkline-Beecham Fellowship at the School of Law at Arizona State University. I am most grateful for these fellowships. I am also grateful to the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation and the Biosocial Re- search Foundation for support of my work. I thank my editor, Kirk Jensen, for his continual encouragement and help. I thank Amy Jacobson for a truly outstanding copyediting of the entire manuscript.

I thank the publishers for permission to reproduce the copyrighted material listed below: Chapter 1: Trivers, Robert L. 1971. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology 46(Mar.): 35–57. Chapter 2: Trivers, Robert L. 1972. Parental investment and sexual selection. In Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man 1871–1971, ed. Bernard Campbell, 136–179. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Chapter 3: Trivers, Robert L., and Dan E. Willard. 1973. Natural selection of parental ability to vary the sex ratio of offspring. Science 179(Jan.): 90–92. Chapter 4: Trivers, Robert L. 1974. Parent–offspring conflict. American Zoologist 14: 249–264. Chapter 5: Trivers, Robert L., and Hope Hare. 1976. Haplodiploidy and the evolution of the social insects: The unusual traits of the social insects are uniquely explained by Hamilton’s kinship theory. Science 191(Jan.): 249–263. Chapter 6: Trivers, Robert L. 1976. Sexual selection and resource- accruing abilities in Anolis garmani. Evolution 30(Jul.): 253–269. Chapter 7: Seger, Jon, and Robert Trivers. 1986. Asymmetry in the evolution of female mating preferences. Nature 319: 771–773. Chapter 8: Trivers, Robert, and Huey P. Newton. 1982. The crash of Flight 90: Doomed by self-deception? Science Digest (Nov.): 66–67, 111. Trivers, Robert. 2000. The elements of a scientific theory of self-deception. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 907(Apr.): 114–131. Chapter 9: Burt, Austin, and Robert Trivers. 1998. Genetic conflicts in genomic imprinting. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (B) 265: 2393–2397. Chapter 10: Manning, J. T., R. L. Trivers, R. Thornhill, and D. Singh. 2000. The 2nd : 4th digit ratio and asymmetry of hand performance in Ja- maican children. Laterality 5(2): 121–132.