To his credit, Trivers is aware of this. “I have noticed that the standards regarding my own arguments I am willing to push forward have dropped,” he admits candidly, even while bearing the flag of a rather unapologetic sociobiology. But this has been his strength throughout his career: to offer, in broad logical strokes, theories that others might test and when successful, formalize. “If you put a gun to my head I could not do a T test,” Trivers recently told an audience at Microsoft, with no false modesty. His brutal self-honesty—about his failures with women, his drug habit, his battle over the years with a debilitating bipolar condition—adds to his believability. Trivers has experienced internal conflict, and many of his insights may stem from this. It may take one to know one.

Still, the science, more or less speculative, more or less brilliant, takes up only half of The Folly of Fools. The rest is reserved for various degrees of invective and ranting. Psychoanalysis, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and economics all come in for a drubbing (“the more social the discipline, the more retarded”); and while some of this makes for amusing and even stimulating reading, other parts seem misplaced, unfair, or misinformed. Trivers tells us that economists “tend to be blind to the possibility that unrestrained pursuit of personal utility can have disastrous effects on group benefit,” even though this tension is at the very core of central fields in economics such as behavioral game theory, social choice, and political economy. Social psychology as a discipline is dismissed outright, even though many of the studies quoted in the book (some of them, incidentally, incredibly weak) come from that discipline. Physicists, too, are treated with scorn: “Their social utility, in my opinion, is primarily connected to warfare. Their major function has been to build bigger bombs.” These are the words of a crank. Still, I laughed out loud at the irresponsibly glib takedown of cultural anthropology and science studies—that “the penis, in some meaningful sense, may be the square root of -1.”

Trivers is even less amusing when he turns to politics. False historical narratives, he argues, are just self-deception bumped up to the group level; and fables of origin, religion, and manifest destiny are merely the tools nations and peoples use to justify conquest and violence. This is shallow stuff. It is striking how adamant Trivers is that certain narratives are completely true while others are completely false: shouldn’t they all be equally self-serving, according to the logic of his evolutionary argument? Most uncomfortable to honest readers will be his strikingly naïve and unimpressive treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, full of half-truths, banalities, and factual errors. A man who has detected conflict even in the ideal of motherly love should know that nothing can be so categorically black and white. But Trivers, when asked recently whether his Middle East politics might turn off people otherwise interested in his scientific ideas, answered—perhaps, one imagines, on a deck in his adopted Jamaica, smoking a joint—”Well, fuck ‘em.”

JUSTICE AND TRUTH are rarely the same thing, which makes it impossible to take some of Trivers’s arguments seriously. Still, something in me respects the unequivocal moral stance while rejecting the lousy history. The means are not always tight, but the ends often seem right. Why is this? A study cited by Trivers offers a clue. Two groups were randomly assigned, and members of the first group were asked to write for five minutes about a situation in which they felt powerful while candy was being distributed among them; at the same time members of the other group were asked to write about a situation of powerlessness and were only allowed to request candy but not to be given any. When all the subjects were asked to snap the fingers of their right hand five times and quickly write the letter E on their forehead, those who had been primed to feel powerless were three times more likely to write the E so that others could read it rather than backward, from their own perspective. Further study showed that the power-primed group was significantly less able to discriminate among human facial expressions associated with fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. It would appear that the ability to apprehend the world correctly, as well as the ability to empathize, is compromised by the feeling of power.