Trivers Visit To Reignite Feud

Robert Trivers—the Rutgers evolutionary biologist who had some less-than-loving things to say about Harvard after being disinvited from a speaking engagement last spring—will be making a Valentine’s Day visit that may prove no less controversial than his last appearance in Cambridge.

The visit by the former Harvard graduate student marks the next chapter in Trivers’ bitter feud over Israeli policy with Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, whose influence, Trivers alleges, was instrumental in preventing Trivers from speaking at the University in the past.

The winner of the prestigious Crafoord Prize for his work on the behavioral patterns of animals, Trivers will deliver a seminar tomorrow afternoon entitled “The Logic of Self Deception and Recent Israeli Behavior.”

The talk is being advertised with an abridged title—“The Logic of Self-Deception”—partly because some faculty were “uncomfortable” with the longer title, according to Trivers’s host, biology professor David A. Haig.

Despite the slight tweaking, Haig—who said that Dershowitz plans to hand out leaflets outside of Trivers’ talk—said that his guest should not feel inclined to amend the planned content of his speech.

“I feel like Robert Trivers is a very distinguished biologist,” Haig said. “He should have the opportunity to say what he wants to say.”

Dershowitz said that those interested would “have to wait and see” whether he will stage some kind of counter-protest outside of tomorrow’s talk, though he said that Trivers has no credentials to speak about issues concerning Israel.

“It’s the worst kind of intellectual abuse of science when an expert on genes tries to apply his genetic theories to prove his political opinions,” he said.

Despite the apparent disconnect between evolutionary biology and Middle East politics, Trivers said he thinks that Israel’s conduct falls in his domain.

“When your field is social theory and your talk is called self-deception,” he said, “all human behavior is part of your field.”

The feud between the two professors dates back to last spring, when Dershowitz publicly criticized Trivers for what he perceived as a physical threat. According to Dershowitz, Trivers sent a letter telling the law professor to “look forward to a visit from me” if he did not end his vocal support for Israeli military action against Lebanon.

In response to the allegations, Trivers shot back, referring to Dershowitz as a “Nazi-like apologist” in a May letter to the Wall Street Journal.

The feud between the two professors boiled over last May when Trivers was scheduled to give a talk at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED).

According to Trivers, he showed up in Cambridge but was told only hours before he was due to speak that the event had been cancelled. A party to honor his recent receipt of the Crafoord Prize was also cancelled.

Trivers has said that he suspects that either Dershowitz, one of the few non-scientists who is a PED faculty affiliate, or Jeffrey E. Epstein—who donated $6.5 million for the creation of PED in 2003 and has retained Dershowitz as a defense attorney to battle an indictment for soliciting prostitution—were responsible for the cancellation of the speech.

PED Director Martin A. Nowak, a mathematical biologist, did not respond to repeated phone and e-mail requests for comment over the past several months. Epstein’s attorney refused to allow questions to be directed to his client when contacted on Monday.

The incident did not go unnoticed by the University community.

The case was one of the perceived violations of academic freedom that prompted anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory ’82 to sponsor a Faculty of Arts and Sciences motion late last year asking the faculty to reaffirm their commitment to free speech.

Matory said Monday that Harvard still had a long way to go in making amends, even in light of Trivers’ scheduled return tomorrow.

“It is disgraceful that he should have been disinvited in the first place,” Matory said. “That he is coming here is just a sign of normalcy, and it does not atone for the fact that he was disinvited in the first place.”

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.