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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’s 100 top scientists and thinkers, while for Stephen Pinker, he’s 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…