Well, as more of a jerk — I think everyone already knew that Robert Trivers was a poor excuse for a human being. But he came up with all these interesting concepts in theoretical evolutionary biology, like reciprocal altruism and parental investment. Well, now Trivers is in the Epstein Files.
Specifically, Nichols found correspondence between Epstein and biologist Robert Trivers dating back to 2009; notably, this was after Epstein had pled guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 and one count of solicitation of prostitution in 2008, and was sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security facility. That first email saw Epstein inviting Trivers to Florida “to discuss what youare [sic] doing,” and offering to pay for Trivers’ tickets and accommodations.
Though it’s unclear when Epstein and Trivers established a financial relationship, by 2015, he had emailed Noam Chomsky claiming that he was Trivers’ “major funder,” after the biologist had been “thrown out of ru=gers [sic] for good this time.” That refers to Rutgers University in New Jersey, where Trivers was suspended from teaching in 2015 after refusing to teach a class.
You don’t get to do that. The faculty in a discipline have obligations to teach, and sometimes you have courses imposed on you. I mean, if I had my way, I’d be teaching developmental biology and evo-devo courses every semester, but there isn’t enough demand to fill those courses, and we also have all these required courses that need to be taught, so teaching the basics within your discipline in addition to your specialties and preferred courses is also necessary. After all, if you don’t teach the core, where will the students qualified to take your advanced courses come from? So I’ve already lost any sympathy for Trivers, and we haven’t dived into the truly evil stuff yet.
Trivers was paid by Epstein to do research on…guess what?
Nichols located an email in which Trivers thanked Epstein for “extra money and appointment as an advisor to your Foundation.” Epstein responded, “i want to see you [sic] piece on transgender in the bio world.” Two months later, Trivers responded and said he was “getting to the end of ‘transsexuality.’”
Trivers continued to make dehumanizing comments about trans women, including, “if you as a heterosexual male and have a minor desire to suck a dick then what better organism to do it with than a transsexual? ‘she’ will smell like a woman, be softer and more hairless like a woman and may, to some degree, actually resemble one morphologically — leaving the dick for you to enjoy in a feminine setting.”
In 2018, Trivers and Epstein once again corresponded about trans people in dehumanizing ways, “comparing” trans women and trans men, with Trivers calling the latter “unhappy and lonely — they are men with mum-pums, the worst of both worlds.”
So Trivers leapt into the field, and published a bad paper that I hadn’t seen before, because I’m not into evolutionary psychology or half-baked phrenological analyses of fingers. I’ve seen it now. Trivers may have won a Crafoord Prize, but he’s also a fucking idiot.
In 2019, Epstein once again encouraged Nichols “to focus on transgender biology.” A year later, and months before Epstein’s death, Trivers published his co-authored research on “transgendered belief,” focusing specifically on ratio of finger length as a supposed predictor for gender identity. (As Nichols notes, this theory is easily “disproven by anyone whose digit ratio does not predict their gender identity,” such as herself.)
I looked into these digit length studies, which claim to be able to detect your sex and sexual orientation from the relative length of you index finger to your ring finger, the 2d:4d ratio. The data is inconsistent and noisy, there might be a weak effect of testosterone on relative finger length, but it’s utterly useless for predicting sex, let alone sexual orientation. It’s the kind of garbage I’d expect to see in an evolutionary psychology journal. I’m aghast that Trivers, or anyone, thinks it useful. What else? Palmistry?
It’s bad science fueled by motivated reasoning and a cash payout by a convicted pedophile, and Trivers supported it. I’m going to have to go back and question all of his contributions to theoretical evolutionary biology now.
Naturally, Trivers made excuses for his friend the pedophile.
Notably, in 2015, Trivers was interviewed by Reuters about his financial relationship with Epstein, saying that the financier remained a friend even despite his allegations of sexual abuse of a minor. “Did he get an easy deal? Did he buy himself a light sentence? Well, yes, probably, compared to what you or I would get, but he did get locked up,” Trivers told the publication at the time, adding, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said.
I think maybe I’m going to be sick.
So, is it OK to traffic grown women and sell them into sexual slavery?
The creationists will have a heyday using this as evidence for evolution being evil because it leads people to sin like this. Never mind that many evolution-denying creationists like Dumb Idiot Ham are in those files, too, perhaps.
Why settle for one bogus statistic when you can compound it with a second?
Finger length could provide vital clue to understanding human brain evolution
I understand that in the US there exists something called a “bowl” which many people are possibly watching on television. There, a so-called “musician” named “Kid Rock” apparently disseminates a sort-of primitive verbal chant that supports pedophilia: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pbMob-0dwL8
@1 I doubt it. They hate transsexual as much as evolution.
@3 The musician performing at the Super Bowl is Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper. Kid Rock is performing at an alternative event for racist white trash put on by Turning Point USA.
Not sure I’ve ever written something that puerile, and I used to shitpost on 4chan while high. (But if I have, I pray to Glycon that no one will ever remind me.)
[Prax, before 4chan, there was alt.tasteless]
Is this surprising? Ideologues and opportunists turn a blind eye to abuse and other misconduct when doing otherwise would be inconvenient. Consider how Rebecca Watson brushed off the mass sexual violence committed against women on Oct. 7.
sinuousrills: “Consider how Rebecca Watson brushed off the mass sexual violence committed against women on Oct. 7.”
I would but I can’t — how about a citation or link or such?
(I think you are bullshitting)
sinuousrills
seconding John Morales
provide some links
I’m guessing sinuousrills is trying to imply that Rebecca’s failure to wholeheartedly support Israel constitutes misogyny…?
Im pretty sure Rabecca has covered how it is standard Israeli state policy to use rape as torture on innocent Palestinians they are unlawfully detaining.
A biologist like Trivers should have worked out within a week of study that there are no reliable biological markers for sexual orientation or identity other than a posteriori ones caused by, say, taking hormones.
gijoel@4–
Please don’t use the word “transsexual.” It is a slur. Use “transgender” instead. The only reasons to use “transsexual” are (a) to discuss why it shouldn’t be used, and (b) when quoting hate speech to demonstrate its awfulness.
Or (c), when singing Sweet Transvestite from Rocky Horror Picture Show. They are from Transexual, Transylvania.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCZDWZFtyWY
Tethys–
Ah, yes, I forgot (c).
(Rocky Horror was written before the word was widely recognised as a slur.)
[related]
crimsonsage @12, a regular thing, that is. As bad as the true Nazis were.
But not just for women:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/not-stay-silent-palestinian-prisoner-sexual-abuse-israeli-jail
↓
Sami al-Saei said he heard the Israeli prison guards who raped him laughing through the assault, before they left him lying blindfolded, handcuffed and in agony on the floor to take a cigarette break.
At least one of the group knew a crime was being committed and intervened, not to stop the torture but to prevent its documentation. Al-Saei said he heard the man warning others “don’t take a photo, don’t take a photo” as they attacked.
He bled from his rectum for more than three weeks after the assault, which happened soon after he was detained in February 2024. He described sexual torture that lasted more than 20 minutes including beatings on his buttocks, a guard applying extreme pressure to his genitals, and forced anal penetration with two different objects.
“I tried to prevent them by clenching my muscles (in my anus), but I could not. They forced it in very deep, it was extremely painful,” he said in an interview about his ordeal. “I don’t know how loudly I screamed from the pain.”
It left him in so much pain that he collapsed twice when ordered to stand up and walk afterwards. Moved to an overcrowded cell, al-Saei said he received no medical treatment and was forced to use wads of toilet paper to staunch the blood.
The 47-year-old father of six was held without charge or trial until June 2025. About 40 days after his release, he posted a video on TikTok detailing the attack, defying the extreme social stigma and Israeli warnings against going public about abuse in jails.
“I could not stay silent. I have a moral responsibility to say what happened to me and other prisoners,” he said.
chrislawson @14
In some people’s opinion. Just as the word “cisgender” is considered a slur by some people. I call myself a “transsexual,” and do not feel insulted by the word. (In the circles I move in, “transgender” is a more generic word, and includes people who have not had medical interventions. So I am both transgender and transsexual.)
Of course, anything can seem like a slur if spoken in a certain tone of voice (e.g., by haters.)
Well that was utterly disgusting. Pass the gargling bleach please.
It is highly revealing that these monsters can only think of trans people in prurient, puerile, fetishised and dehumanising terms. I mean “organism” – yuck yuck yuck. If ever Granny Weatherwax’s axiom that the root of all evil is treating people like things was more appropriate, I don’t know when..
But clearly that’s how these people think. About trans people, yes, but about women more generally. They have a pathological, monomaniacal obsession with their meagre and diseased idea of sex and gender roles, and it never seems far from the surface in their dealings with others.
The question is, are such attitudes propagated by the culture of the disgustingly rich or do the disgusting riches just allow people who would otherwise hold them to do horrible things in service to these attitudes?
cartomancer, be reflexive. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghislaine_Maxwell — not a man.
(Same ideas, different sex. Pecking order, in chickens)
Can confirm, according to them my right hand is male while my left hand is not. I’m also inconsistent and noisy at times ;)
John Morales, #20,
I don’t know how the women involved in these particular cultures of disgustingly rich misogyny feel and think. Perhaps one day their private correspondence will emerge and we will be able to tell.
I would guess that there is some significant cognitive dissonance, probably along class lines. “We’re the elite ruling class, the misogynistic assumptions about filthy poor women don’t apply to us”. That sort of thing. Or maybe they do buy in to the misogynistic assumptions more deeply than we would expect? It’s rather like the question of whether women from patriarchal, misogynistic cultures of the past bought in to those attitudes – with little to nothing of their own reflections on the topic, we are at something of a loss. Or maybe Maxwell is such a sociopath that she doesn’t much think about the wider cultural impact of her actions at all.
The question remains, however – does the cultural world of the super-rich oligarchic elite create misogyny, or does it just give rich misogynists more options and less pushback? The Frankfurt School Marxist in me says it must absolutely be the former, but I’m not so sure.
cartomancer, basically, you are buying into the gendering thingy.
People are people. Those in the upper strata live the life. Pecking order.
(Also, Maxwell’s story is a bit sad. Bad, bad father, bad growing up, suddenly adrift without wealth or status. Found a sponsor, for the low low cost of participation)
Trivers is all over the Epstein files.
Here’s an FBI report indicating Trivers sexually assaulted a woman in a restaurant in 2019:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01249279.pdf
Here’s a 2018 letter in which Trivers denies he exposed himself to a woman:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00846750.pdf
Be a bit strange if a culture like that of these disgusting oligarchs, which places a lot of emphasis on gender roles and expectations, DIDN’T affect people identifying as different genders differently, eh?
I mean, it’s possible there is no meaningful difference in how men and women tend to navigate this culture, but I’d be very surprised.
Cartomancer at #22 who wrote: “I don’t know how the women involved in these particular cultures of disgustingly rich misogyny feel and think.” Really? No idea? There are no public statements from them about how they “feel and think?” Have you tried to find out?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/11/20/epstein-1000-survivors-victims-not-politics/87335276007/
It isn’t like they’ve been silent:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/25/trump-sexual-misconduct-allegations-timeline
There is an abundant public record from survivors:
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/23-793/23-793-2024-12-30.html
@26: I think, in context, that #22 is talking about the women who are accomplices and enablers in the exploitation of other women, e.g. Ghislaine Maxwell. (Yes, some of them may have first been victims themselves, to some degree).
Posted this at Mano’s blog, but it seems relevant here too: I fell down an internet rabbit hole last night, and wound up reading about this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kendall_Thaw. Both Thaw and the man he killed are examples of this same phenomenon: men with too much money, no moral centre, and a certain attitude towards women.That was 120 years ago. La plus ca change….
cartomancer @19
Based on my experience, having grown up in Male (USA) culture, I’d say the attitudes are prevalent among poor, middle income, and rich alike. (It’s why I fled maleness as soon as I could see it was possible. I call myself a “refugee from Manistan.”) It’s just that the rich and powerful have more resources to act on their attitudes and escape any consequences, like they do in every other area of life.
And, yes, there are women who abet this stuff. Sucking up to the power. Identifying with the oppressors. (And this also applies to all income levels.)
Allison @18,
Yeah, AFAIK a fair number of older trans folks identify that way. I have no problem with people self-labeling that way, but I wouldn’t call someone else a transsexual unless they’d already done so in my presence.
With regards to the discussion about the thinking of women who go along with this… I mean, we’ve got lots of real-world examples, many of whom haven’t been exactly quiet. Certainly ‘I’m rich/powerful, the rules for the lesser people won’t apply to me‘ is a big part of it in some cases.
To stick with a safer fictional example, I recall hearing about a plot thread in Mad Men where the wife of one of the main characters actively undermined another woman’s successes. Why? Because she’d had to sacrifice her own dreams and marry someone important to become important herself, and she just couldn’t bear the thought that any woman could make it on her own without having to make the same sacrifices. It was all about her self-image of merely having done what she had to do, and anybody who could be successful in other ways was a threat to that self-image.
I’m sure there are multiple reasons, but never underestimate the strength of the idea of ‘I’d rather be on the second rung from the bottom stepping on others than on the bottom rung helping others push up.’
Allison@18–
To clarify: If a trans person identifies as “transsexual”, I’m certainly not opposing that. Unfortunately it’s hard to convey every possible variation in a short comment.
Having said that, every trans group I’ve ever communicated with considers “transsexual” a slur. The reason, I believe, is that the word was a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM up until 1994 and therefore represents a pathologisation. It’s great that you don’t feel that way about the word, but I think anyone who is not trans should avoid it.
Btw, the only people I’ve ever encountered who consider “cisgender” a slur are trans-haters looking to (a) falsely play the victim and (b) make it impossible to discuss trans issues reasonably. I’d be interested to learn of any counter-examples.
@8,
you’re lying, there was as much sexual abuse on that day as there were beheaded babies. Zero, zip, zilch. It was all zionist propaganda. The New York Times sent various correspondents to Israel, including ex-IDF personnel, to find these rape victims, and over 3 months of investigating they did not find a single one. I’m sure you can google that if you don’t believe me.