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For a man who disappeared off the map for years at a time, Robert Trivers has won heavy-duty accolades. Time magazine rated him one of the 20th century鈥檚 100 top scientists and thinkers, while for Stephen Pinker, he鈥檚 one of the greats in western intellectual history. The plaudits are for his graduate work in the 1970s, drawing on evolution to explain many aspects of human and animal social behaviour. His ideas on parental investment, and on altruism in unrelated animals, among other things, helped launch behavioural ecology. Controversial, sometimes troubled, and always outspoken, he told Peter Aldhous how his new book fits among myriad passions.

Your new book tackles 鈥渟elfish genetic elements鈥�. What attracted you to them 鈥� are they the same as 鈥渟elfish genes鈥�?

Richard Dawkins coined the term 鈥渟elfish genes鈥� as a metaphor for the action of all genes. But these are truly selfish genes, genes that actually lower the reproductive success of the organism. By conventional logic, they should be selected against, but they are favoured because they give themselves a narrow advantage. Some manage to reproduce themselves more quickly than the 鈥渇air rules鈥� of sexual reproduction, which allocate members of each pair of chromosomes to sperm and eggs at random, ought to permit. They also include transposable elements, which copy themselves and place the copies elsewhere in the genome. Other selfish elements make their bearers favour organisms likely to carry copies of themselves. For example, a gene on the Y chromosome could make its carrier favour only male relatives.

In the late 1980s I knew about selfish genes, and I thought this paralleled the situation that existed in the early 1960s, where everybody was interpreting social behaviour in terms of the species or the group. We had this dominant paradigm that genes only spread when they give a positive contribution to the reproductive success of the individual. Now we see that鈥檚 not the case. My intuition was that this was much more important than we had recognised. I thought I鈥檇 whip genetics into shape in three to five years, but I had no idea how big the literature was. In 1992, I was fortunate to accrue a co-author, Austin Burt. He was younger, stronger, thought he was brighter, and was willing to assume more than half the load. I could not have done the book without him. He probably could have done it without me.

This sounds like the birth of a revolution.

This is an area of genetics that has never been presented as a whole before. If you want a complete view of evolution, one important level to look at lies between the gene and the individual, where it鈥檚 critical to have a clear view of how natural selection operates. Some of the variables important in understanding the social life of an individual are also important in describing the spread, or not, of selfish genes. It鈥檚 a parallel universe of social interactions where some of the principles I worked on in the 1970s show up again. I think that鈥檚 bound to lead to a burst of creative work, when geneticists, evolutionary biologists, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists see the connections.

You were also in the right place at the right time in your earlier work鈥�

My goal back then was to make a contribution to social theory based on evolutionary biology. We had social theory in a variety of disciplines 鈥� philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, cultural and social anthropology 鈥� none of which was based on natural selection. I saw a great opportunity to contribute to major topics that were quite obviously human-oriented. For example, reciprocal altruism, where we remember interactions with other individuals, is a phenomenon that鈥檚 very important in our own species but probably not very important in the lives of most frogs. And parent-offspring conflict, another area that I worked in a lot, is of enormous importance in species with the longest period of parental investment, but negligible in those where the only parental investment lies in producing the eggs.

Yet your ideas and the wider field of sociobiology were opposed by some academics, mostly from the political left. Why?

They were a bunch of pseudo-radical, pseudo-Marxists who tried to enhance their reputations by opposing this work. It was Ed Wilson鈥檚 book Sociobiology that brought the whole thing out into the open. I was under the radar before then. I thought reciprocal altruism brought about a biological theory of justice, so people who went around claiming they cared about justice ought to have been delighted that it had a deeper foundation than mere cultural whim. Parent-offspring conflict championed the viewpoint of the offspring. My ideas on parental investment and sexual selection provided a sex-blind system of logic where the key parameter was relative investment in offspring, not some intrinsic sex difference like who has balls and who has ovaries. I thought I was on the side of the angels. Where were the negative political implications of my work?

As a graduate student, you began working in Jamaica, which has remained an important part of your life. What attracted you to the island?

My professor at Harvard was expert on Anolis tree-climbing lizards. He was going on a collecting expedition, and he wanted a graduate student, so he talked me into coming with him. My standard joke is that I took one look at the women, I took a second look at the island, and I decided that if I had to become a lizard man to pay for frequent trips to Jamaica, I鈥檇 humble myself and become one. I fell in love with the island, and I married a beautiful, strong woman. I was given a piece of land as a wedding gift. Eventually, in 1992, I built a house.

And you鈥檝e used the island for your work too?

Every March since 1996 I have gone to study a group of youngsters there. The project is designed to run until death us do part. They鈥檙e now between 16 and 22 years old. We take various body measures to record their degree of symmetry. This is a measure of biological quality, the best one we have. The idea is that problems during development can cause the body to develop asymmetrically, and we relate this to various aspects of behaviour. In December we published a paper in Nature on dance. We used motion-capture imaging to see whose dances young women and men preferred when they weren鈥檛 able to identify the individuals. The women, particularly, preferred the dances of symmetrical men. Now we鈥檙e starting to get life outcomes, showing how asymmetry relates to reproductive success.

You鈥檝e suffered from bipolar disorder, which has been linked to creativity. Do you attribute any of your own creative insights to it?

I don鈥檛 have views on it in my own case. I鈥檝e followed some of the evidence. But I don鈥檛 regard the experience as being positive at all. In fact, it was very costly, in lots of different ways 鈥� time lost, energy lost, sometimes status lost.

You went on to the University of California, Santa Cruz. What happened?

It was a ridiculous place. They didn鈥檛 approve of my friendship with Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party. There were no evolutionists to talk to. I also had a costly breakdown. I was put on the slow track, with no opportunities for advancement. It was dreadful.

How did you become friends with Newton?

He applied to take a reading course with me while in prison. My judgment, long before I met him, was that he was a positive force. What Huey did was to discipline the then almost exclusively white police. The Black Panthers started in Oakland, California, following the police at night and reading the law to them. That was long overdue. Killing police officers was the ultimate discipline. The Black Panthers helped to cause wholesale integration of US police departments. The police figured out, if we鈥檝e got black people firing at us, then we鈥檇 better have black officers firing back.

You even ended up planning some work together?

Huey and I had a contract to write a book on deceit and self-deception. I had a lousy agent back then, who set me up with a dying book company. So the book died. Then Huey and I drifted apart. His first wife, who was a wonderful woman, left him. He started heading downhill into a life of more extreme drug abuse and running the streets at night. Finally he was in prison for a couple of years, then he was killed within three months of coming out.

鈥淚 fell in love with Jamaica. Now I have a project there on asymmetry and reproductive success鈥�

But now you are returning to the topic of deceit and self-deception?

Yes, it鈥檚 been a lifelong interest of mine, and I am working on a book. The driving idea is that self-deception evolves in the service of deceit. I think that self-deception not only hides your deceit better from others but also allows you to practise deception in a less cognitively expensive way. If you鈥檙e aware of the truth and the untruth simultaneously, and you鈥檙e trying to project the untruth, that鈥檚 cognitively expensive. But if you make at least part of deception unconscious, then it鈥檚 less demanding. I want to organise the whole field of self-deception coherently. When we pray, are we practising self-deception? When we have positive illusions that are partly self-fulfilling, is that the same kind of thing as when we suppress information the better to fool others? What kind of deceit and self-deception do you expect in your relations with your parents? What kind do you expect in relations between the sexes? What differences do you expect between males and females?

Again, this sounds quite political?

There鈥檚 certainly going to be a chapter on deceit, self-deception and war. This Iraq disaster is almost prototypical. Deceit and self-deception made a major contribution, illustrated primarily by the complete failure to plan rationally for the consequences of the invasion. We know that this war was concocted by a small number of people working in secrecy. The optimism, the failure to attend to reality and to take in alternative viewpoints, and the failure to plan rationally was self-deception entrained by deception. This book was sold as a popular book. I鈥檓 not going to sit and write an academic tome. I want Oprah Winfrey to have it on her book club.