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Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology
This book is the first devoted to modern biology’s innovators and iconoclasts: men and women who challenged prevailing notions in their fields. Some of these scientists were Nobel Prize winners, some were considered cranks or gadflies, some were in fact wrong. The stories of these stubborn dissenters are individually fascinating. Taken together, they provide unparalleled insights into the role of dissent and controversy in science and especially the growth of biological thought over the past century. Each of the book’s nineteen specially commissioned chapters offers a detailed portrait of the intellectual rebellion of a particular scientist working in a major area of biology--genetics, evolution, embryology, ecology, biochemistry, neurobiology, and virology as well as others. An introduction by the volume’s editors and an epilogue by R. C. Lewontin draw connections among the case studies and illuminate the nonconforming scientist’s crucial function of disturbing the comfort of those in the majority. By focusing on the dynamics and impact of dissent rather than on “winners” who are credited with scientific advances, the book presents a refreshingly original perspective on the history of the life sciences. Scientists featured in this volume: Alfred Russel Wallace Hans Driesch Wilhelm Johannsen Raymond Arthur Dart C. D. Darlington Richard Goldschmidt Barbara McClintock Oswald T. Avery Roger Sperry Leon Croizat Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards Peter Mitchell Howard Temin Motoo Kimura William D. Hamilton Carl Woese Stephen Jay Gould Thelma Rowell Daniel S. Simberloff .
Price: $28.72
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Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health
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 Ecology, Agriculture, and Health breaks from the confines of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending our 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, public health, and dialectics. They dismantle contemporary ideologies that attempt to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how dialectical philosophy provides a basis for grappling with a world characterized by constant change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the incisive essays of two prominent scientists who are working to empower the public by demystifying science and nature. .
Price: $14.22
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The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment
There is the Richard Lewontin nonbiologists know, the author of acerbic, thoughtful, witty, unhesitatingly leftist books such as Not in Our Genes and the essays from The New York Review of Books collected in It Ain't Necessarily So. This is the other Lewontin, the hardcore scientist, one of the most insightful evolutionary biologists going. The Triple Helix is a manifesto for the life sciences: "The time has come when further progress in our understanding of nature requires that we reconsider the relationship between the outside and the inside, between organism and environment." Lewontin is not arguing for what he calls "obscurationist holism," but for a more complex interaction between gene, organism, and environment, in which they construct each other: .... It is the biology, indeed the genes, of an organism that determines its effective environment, by establishing the way in which external physical signals become incorporated into its reactions.... Whatever the autonomous processes of the outer world may be, they cannot be perceived by the organism. Its life is determined by the shadows on the wall, passed through a transforming medium of its own creation. Lewontin argues for a life science that faces up to reality, that tackles the problems of studying subtle processes in complex systems where three-dimensional shape is crucial. The journal Nature "cannot recommend [the book] too highly for the many commentators and headline writers who think that DNA is the blueprint for the organism"--or for their readers. --Mary Ellen Curtin.
Price: $7.20
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Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA
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It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions
Stephen Jay Gould calls Richard Lewontin "simply the smartest man I have ever met." And not the least opinionated, either. Lewontin has long been famous among biologists for a volatile combination of feisty leftism, scientific insight, and verbal skill, which have been displayed for the more general public in his essays for what has been called The New York Review of Each Other's Books. It Ain't Necessarily So is a collection of some of his more characteristic reviews from the 1980s and 1990s. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould; Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson; sociological studies of Sex in America; and Ruth Hubbard's books on gender in science: all his essays are informative yet lively, with a high acid content--as when he begins his piece on the Human Genome Project with a definition of "fetish." Lewontin's prose is worth reading in itself, but what lifts this anthology to another level is that it also includes replies and rebuttals selected from the New York Review's letters column--a forum that doubles as the intellectual's World Wrestling Federation. For the older pieces, he also includes updates, "where are they now" summaries to give a sense of historical change in each field. Assertive, brilliant, sarcastic, dense, wide-ranging--Lewontin may be challenging, but he is never dull. --Mary Ellen Curtin.
Price: $1.40
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Human Diversity (Scientific American Library Series)
A growing number of aspects of human nature are proving to be genetically based, but it is important not to jump to the conclusion that everything about human nature is determined by genes. Richard Lewontin, eminent geneticist from Harvard and founding member of "Science for the People," has written an accessible and important book about the limits of genetic determinism, especially in defining putative differences between races. In technical terms, his basic argument is that the genetic differences between races are not significantly greater than the genetic differences between randomly selected humans within any race. The first edition in 1982, based largely on studies of protein polymorphisms, was prompted in large part by his concerns with the potential dangers of E.O. Wilson's encyclopedic, masterful (but now somewhat dated) Sociobiology, and this 1995 edition includes a considerable amount of more recent evidence from DNA analyses for Lewontin's argument. Recommended..
Price: $5.99
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