On Thursday, Robert L. Trivers took a train to Boston to give a talk at Harvard University the next day. Trivers is a prominent evolutionary biologist and anthropologist at Rutgers University and he had been invited to Cambridge in honor of his having won this year’s Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, a top international award that many consider a notch below the Nobel.

Trivers never got to give his talk. He says that hours before he was scheduled to lecture, he was called by an organizer and told that the appearance was being called off because of statements he had made about and to Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal last week, Trivers quoted from an April letter he had sent Dershowitz. In that letter, Trivers wrote: “Regarding your rationalization of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, let me just say that if there is a repeat of Israeli butchery toward Lebanon and if you decide once again to rationalize it publicly, look forward to a visit from me. Nazis — and Nazi-like apologists such as yourself — need to be confronted directly.”

According to Trivers, Dershowitz used his letter to have him declared “a threat” and blocked from speaking at Harvard.

[HNN Editor: The scientist, whose two sisters are married to Lebanese nationals, says he never intended to threaten Dershowitz physically.]

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