The academy is the nation's pre-eminent learned society and research institution, and the honor is considered second only to winning a Nobel Prize. The academy's 2005 class of 196 fellows and 17 foreign honorary members also includes Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell, actor and director Sidney Poitier, journalist Tom Brokaw and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Trivers and the other new members will be officially inducted in October.
Trivers redefined the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology by applying the theory of natural selection to the evolution of social behavior – exploring the logic by which social traits are favored by natural selection and evolve through time like physical characteristics. He considered how natural selection acts on behavioral conflicts between parents and offspring, in the choice of mates and the way in which people interact to get what they want from others in their social groups. He has written extensively on the evolution of altruism, parental investment and sexual selection, the sex ratio, deceit and self-deception.
Trivers may be best known for his theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby an apparently altruistic behavior is performed with the understanding that the recipient will reciprocate at some future: the theory expressed in its simplest form as "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." As applied to humans, Trivers said, the theory posits that "traits like friendship evolved after reciprocal altruism as a way of motivating and shaping our reciprocal relationships."
More recently, Trivers shifted gears to the consideration of the biological evolution of "selfish genetic elements," genes within an individual which advance their own replication at the expense of the larger organism. The resulting conflict within our genomes may have had wide-ranging effects over time.
Lately, he has been engaged in longitudinal studies on Jamaican school children, exploring the relationship between bilateral asymmetry in the body and a variety of social behaviors. In tracking these children, Trivers has become specifically interested in the health of the children, their long-term growth and development, and the social behavior they display. Recently, with Rutgers anthropologist Lee Cronk, he showed that symmetrical Jamaicans are better dancers and that this is more true of men than of women.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." Membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Drawing on the expertise of its members, the academy conducts thoughtful, innovative and nonpartisan studies on international security, social policy, education and the humanities.