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I continue to comb through The Files from Hell so you don’t have to, and today I want to share what I found out about the relationship between a dead child-rapist Jeffrey Edward Epstein and a should-be-dead-soon-if-we’re-lucky pseudo-intellectual piece of shit named Robert Ludlow Trivers.
You’re welcome.
Trivers, 83, is a mediocre white man still hailed in many circles as an influential evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist.
He shouldn’t be.
And anyone who still thinks he’s smart is probably an idiot, just like Trivers.
His “important” work, pioneered back in the 1970s when he still had a full head of hair, is one big exercise in motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, non-falsifiable thinking, and pseudoscience in service to his ad-hoc hypotheses — a classic case of a sexist, racist, bloviating, narcissistic pus-bucket who hid his personal insecurities, depravities and lack of conscience behind “academic research” as a university professor, one of the few careers where men with his so-called personality are still allowed to spew bullshit in lecture halls whilst getting paid for it.
Well, until he got fired, anyway. Which he did. In 2015. From Rutgers. Where he did things like — brace yourselves — lick the ear of a pregnant student, who complained about this to the administration there. He also insulted women students generally from behind his protective podium. A lot. And they complained about him. A lot. Oh, and he also threatened to hurt and perhaps kill a colleague back in 2012. None of this got him fired though. He was only fired after he refused to teach a course on aggression, saying he knew nothing about it whilst, you know, being aggressive.
God, I hate men like Bob. Can I call him Bob now? I don’t want to dignify him by using his last name. Bob would have been perfectly despicable without a close friendship with Epstein — Jeff. Can I call him Jeff? Yes. His close friendship with Jeff over decades. Bob would have been worthy of shoving out of a plane into an active volcano even without the more than 900 emails between the two (or their assistants) that I was able to find in the digital Syrup of Ipecac that is Los Epstein Files. But alas, there is all of THAT, too.
I’ve seen a bunch of corporate media articles that say things like “Jeffrey Epstein liked to surround himself with the greatest minds in science.” That’s simply not true. Yes, Jeff often met with CERTAIN professors, academics and scientists. But he, like Bob, was extremely selective — and by that I mean Jeff cherry-picked ‘scientists,’ selecting only those, like Steven Pinker (or, as I like to think of him, Peeven Stinker) who were willing to cherry-pick ‘facts’ to bolster their fucked-up beliefs.
Nowhere was this adoration of intellectually dishonest ballsacks more apparent than in Jeff’s relationship with Bob, who dedicated his career to asserting that the very worst traits of men who rape, kill and bully — men like Bob and Jeff — confer some sort of evolutionary biological advantage.
Bob’s approach to biology, if one can even call it that, was appealing to Jeff, who hosted Bob many times at his properties, even bringing Bob’s then 17-year-old son to Jeff’s Palm Beach estate at one point. And as for Jeff being an intellectual? A cursory read of the misspelled, poorly-punctuated emails of this college dropout tells the truth: Jeff was a good conman and rapist, but he was not a sophisticated intellectual by any stretch of the imagination. In a wonderful article in The Outline about Jeff’s love of evolutionary biologists like Bob, writer Alexandra Walling quotes a frequent dinner guests of Jeff’s as saying he had no ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes without interrupting to ask things like, “What does this have to do with pussy?”
Anyway.
After one visit to Jeff’s place, Bob emails Jeff gushingly, to say he had a wonderful time, noting he especially “loved Jeff’s staff, as usual,” saying “it was a REAL pleasure,” with REAL in all caps. The pure juvenile snickering of the email’s tone would be pathetic if it didn’t seem like some kind of clumsy code for “thanks for letting me ‘hang out’ with those little girls again.”
Anyway, such a shitforbrains frat-boy approach to evolutionary biology has unfortunately not been all that unusual under patriarchy. Western academia has historically favored degenerate men so steeped in the culture of Judeo-Christian misogyny — even whilst proclaiming their oh-so-sciencey atheism — that they were incapable of anything remotely like scientific objectivity. Men like Bob. Men who shove their broken observations of the natural world through a fetid personal sieve of sexism and colonialist racism.
But even amongst that gaggle of dumbasses, Bob stands out for his Superior Dumbassery. In email after email, some sent in the middle of the night, Bob basically begs for Jeff to like him. Kind of like those pathetic emails from Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, begging to come to parties and asking how to get girls. In paragraph after paragraph, Bob tells Epstein about his life, the way an adolescent boy might try to impress his older brother who blows frogs up for fun. Jeff answers the way any good domineering dipshit who realizes he’s got the insecure professor right where he wants him should: with a word or two. No more than that. Leaves Bob to twist.
It’s clear from their exchanges that Jeff was not overly impressed with Bob, likely because insecurity as blatant as Bob’s would read as uninteresting to a psychopath like Jeff, who liked a challenge. Bob was too easy to manipulate. Too easy to bend. To eager to please. Rapists hate that.
Nonetheless, Jeff DID finance a bit of research for Bob: $20,000 here, $30,000 there. The most Jeff ever gave Bob at once appears to have been $40,000. In an email to fellow pseudointellect Noem Chomsky in the wake of Bob’s firing, Jeff brags about being Bob’s sole patron.
In exchange for this money, Jeff seems to have steered the direction of Bob’s research and career, evidenced by emails about papers and talks Bob tells Jeff he’s done, “just like you told me to.” He says this twice, like a kid who finished chores and wants daddy to come see.
Now, I know this seems like a lot of money to many of us. But there are other scientists who got half a million to a million bucks or more from Jeff. Twenty grand under these circumstances feels almost insulting. When Bob got fired from Rutgers, former MIT professor (and fellow depraved fuckwit) Joi Ito emailed Jeff about it, asking if he’d heard, Jeff replied, simply, “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
The most obvious project Jeff funded for Bob was one in 2014 in which Bob set out to “prove” that a supposed superior symmetry in Jamaican people was the reason they “are better at sprinting.”
But the “symmetrical knees” study was only the front-facing hypothesis.
Behind it lay two extremely creepy truths.
One, Bob, who is white, has had a lifelong obsession with black (and sometimes brown) women, one that he alludes to several times in the emails with Jeff. He loves black women because he believes selective breeding by white men made them “superior” genetically.
In an email about a trip he took to give a lecture in Zagreb, Croatia, Bob tells Jeff the women are very beautiful but lighter-skinned than he usually enjoys. Of the lecture itself, Bob brags that he has a whole section in which he “slices and dices the feminists.” He seems to think this will make Jeff like him more. It didn’t work.
Anyway. In other emails, Bob goes on and on about the physical attractiveness of an East Indian woman scientist, and makes multiple references to his fetish for black women.
Two, Bob tells Jeff he chose Jamaica to do the research, because it was to be conducted on children by filming them dancing and then measuring their body parts and proportions. This type of research, he says, would be easier in Jamaica because the government was lax about doing testing on children, whereas most other countries with large Jamaican diaspora populations, such as England, were strict about NOT doing such experiments on kids.
There is no barf emoji big enough for this horror.
The entire premise that black Jamaicans are faster sprinters than other people because of their superior symmetry, of course, is rooted in another widespread myth embraced by white supremacist “biologists” like Bob. They love to claim that slaveowners “bred” Africans like dogs, to be physically superior but intellectually inferior to damp and clammy brainturds like Bob. It’s all bullshit, but couched in academic language that gets published by human zitcores like Bob, who, it should be noted, briefly joined The Black Panthers in the 1970s, but only, he later said, to meet black women.
And while this whole “research on Jamaican kids funded by Jeff” thing is sickening, there’s something possibly more disturbing hidden in the emails between these two monsters.
In more than 30 pages of correspondence in the files, Bob and Jeff discuss the sociobiological rationale for honor killings of girls who have been raped by multiple men.
Bob seems particularly titillated by the idea that honor killings are evolution at work. He goes on and on to Jeff about it. Jeff funds research for Bob in this area, too, and you can see Bob doing all sorts of mental contortions so that he can make the idea of killing girls for getting raped by more than one man seem NATURAL and even DESIRABLE for those who wish to help “breed” a superior genetic strain of people. Bob’s fuckedup thinking is basically something along the lines of, “if her genes were any good to begin with, she wouldn’t be getting herself raped so much.”
This is all disgusting at face value. But coupled with witness testimony about girls being raped but multiple men and then murdered and buried at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico roughly around the same time that these “papers” are being formulated, it is terrifying — and begs the question: Was Epstein seeking to elevate his most depraved actions by having murderous impulses towards rape victims validated as the actions of superior males? Did he, in fact, pay Bob to write, publish and promote, even as a TEDx talk, the nonsense “science” to prove it?
Certainly seems so. In one email about a check Jeff sent Bob, Jeff’s team describes the purpose of the tens of thousands of dollars with one simple word: “Gratitude.”
In one particularly weird email to Jeff, Bob, who often apologizes for emailing Jeff whenever Jeff doesn’t answer right away, confesses that he has been feeling both suicidal and homicidal in recent days.
That’s the word Bob uses: homicidal. As in, Hi Jeff, I am homicidal.
Bob has never been arrested for any of this. He is still alive, “living quietly” according to Psychology Today, somewhere in Jamaica. And despite his stupid research and decades-long buddy-film relationship with Jeff, he’s still being lauded as some sort of genius by tech bros and oligarchs like Jeff Bezos. Amazon studios released a fawning documentary about Bob in 2024.
Now, because I don’t want to close on a completely demoralizing note, I want to mention here the name of a truly great biologist whose life’s work debunked all the kinds of shit men like Bob have been trying to claim is true: Primatologist Dr. Frans de Waal, whose deeply compassionate work proved once and for all that evolution is not survival of the most violent, domineering, rapacious pieces of shit.
Evolution, Dr. de Waal showed us, clearly favors empathy, compassion and kindness. Not brute force. In nature, animals like Bob and Jeff get their testicles ripped off by the females in the group, and bleed out.
Which is why, unless our society begins to elect leaders who behave more like Bonobos than they do like Jeff and bob, human beings are destined, as Mr. George Carlin once so gracefully put it, to be just another evolutionary cul-de-sac.
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