Review: Biology as Ideology by Richard Lewontin

Lewontin has a few ideas he wants everyone — scientists and those outside the profession alike — to incorporate into their worldview. First, that genes do not dictate our social behaviour (i.e., against sociobiology); instead, the gene-organism-environment relationship is dialectical, with each influencing and defining the others. Second, science is a political activity: our worldview influences our experimental designs and our interpretation of the world around us.

This is the third work I have read by Lewontin, and all of them make this same case, relying on similar examples and arguments. The Dialectical Biologist is the oldest, and is a collection of several essays and chapters. The rhetoric is a little rougher around the edges, and it is at times more focused on the particular target at hand than on a general framework for understanding science. And yet, because this iteration is also written with passion and urgency, it is the one I would recommend for the scientist eager for a polemic. The Triple Helix is the detailed and carefully constructed from a scientific perspective; the author tours us through the scientific literature to understand the relationship between the three strands of the helix: gene, organism, environment. This is the one I would recommend for scientists in general, though the political threads are more muted. 

Biology as Ideology is a Massey Lecture, intentionally written for a broad audience, and it fulfills that purpose wonderfully; I would recommend it for a general audience. The ideas are polished and woven together elegantly yet conversationally. The examples are well-chosen to be illustrative and approachable. If I have a critique, it is that the author leaves unsaid what should be done now that the reader (or listener) has this newfound appreciation for dialectical biology and the political ideology of science. The worldview Lewontin introduces us to is not (only) about more accurately describing the world, but about changing it, yet that is left as an exercise for the reader.