Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society »

Richard Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. He is the author of The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (2000), It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2000), Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1992), Human Diversity (1982), and (with Richard Levins) The Dialectical Biologist (1985).

Richard Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences, Department of Population and International Health at Harvard University.

How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world.

In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.

Dedication     7
Introduction     9
Part 1
The End of Natural History?     13
The Return of Old Diseases and the Appearance of New Ones     17
False Dichotomies     23
Chance and Necessity     27
Organism and Environment     31
The Biological and the Social     35
How Different Are Natural and Social Science?     39
Does Anything New Ever Happen?     43
Life on Other Worlds     47
Are We Programmed?     53
Evolutionary Psychology     59
Let the Numbers Speak     65
The Politics of Averages     71
Schmalhausen's Law     75
A Program for Biology     81
Part 2
Ten Propositions on Science and Antiscience     87
Dialectics and Systems Theory     101
Aspects of Whole and Parts in Population Biology     125
Strategies of Abstraction     149
The Butterfly ex Machina     167
Educating the Intuition to Cope with Complexity     183
Preparing for Uncertainty     199
Part 3
Greypeace     219
Genes, Environment, and Organisms     221
The Dream of the Human Genome     235
Does Culture Evolve?     267
Is Capitalism a Disease?: The Crisis in U.S. Public Health     297
Science and Progress: Seven Developmentalist Myths in Agriculture     321
The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian     329
How Cuba Is Going Ecological     343
Living the 11th Thesis     365
Notes     375
Index     391