This volume presents papers from one of the leading figures of sociobiology, each with a contectualizing introduction. It functions as a portrait of the intellectual development of sociobiology, with insights pertaining to evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology.

Robert Trivers is a pioneering figure in the field of sociobiology. For Natural Selection and Social Theory, he has selected eleven of his most influential papers, including several classic papers from the early 1970s on the evolution of reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflicts, and asymmetry in sexual selection, which helped to establish the centrality of sociobiology, as well as some of his later work on deceit in signalling, sex antagonistic genes, and imprinting. Trivers introduces each paper, setting them in their contemporary context, and critically evaluating them in the light of subsequent work and further developments. The result is a unique portrait of the intellectual development of sociobiology, with valuable insights for evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology.

One striking feature of Trivers' papers is that most contain very little mathematics, but there is plenty of verbal logic ... the book is suitable for reading in bed with falling asleep over pages of baffling formulae ... interesting stuff.