Review: The Dialectical Biologist By Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin

Although it is possible to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in a field like biology without taking a single post-secondary philosophy course, I don’t think it should be. Through practice, biology can teach you how to think, but I don’t think it teaches you how to think about how you think. Philosophy helps you step outside your thought patterns and examine assumptions or limitations you didn’t realize you were making. 

The essays in this book take as their target scientists who are correct in applying their craft — at least by conventional standards of logic and statistics — but nonetheless draw incorrect conclusions. These vary from incorrect models of evolution (e.g., one-way adaptation of creatures to their environment instead of a dynamic relationship between creature and environment), to deductions of processes that fail to consider the contingency of an observed relationship, to the chauvinism of expecting a western model of science to be universally optimal.

This anthology is now several decades old and biology has necessarily abandoned some of its insistence on what the authors term Cartesian science — a reductionist approach that fails to account for mutual interdependence, interconnectivity, and change. My own PhD research examined some of this: how do certain relationships change while other environmental variables are also in flux? In trying to navigate such a problem, I found myself becoming more fluent in dialectical materialism, although I didn’t know the term for it. 

Although biology has progressed, Cartesian reductionism remains prevalent. I find myself butting up against it often when I try to communicate the work I do. The essays felt cathartic to read: here, too, were other scientists fighting the same fights I fight (particularly chapter 4).

Because this book is a collection of essays not intended to be read together, the essays sometimes repeat metaphors or examples or concepts. An abridged reading of my favourite chapters that retains the sweeping scope and remains feeling fresh and pertinent would be the Introduction, followed by chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13 and the Conclusion.