Lewontin, Richard

LEWONTIN, RICHARD (1929-2021). One of the two most prominent, avowed US socialist scientists during their lifetimes, Richard Lewontin shared this honor with his friend Stephen Jay Gould. A polymath evolutionary biologist, geneticist, mathematician, and social critic, Lewontin pioneered paradigm-changing theories in several fields and committed himself to leftwing causes through his adult life.

Raised in Manhattan and descended from Jewish immigrants, Lewontin graduated from Harvard University in biology in 1951, gained an MS in mathematical statistics the following year at Columbia University, and completed a PhD in zoology there in 1954. He taught at several schools, including the University of Chicago, before joining the Harvard biology department in 1973. In Chicago, he became deeply involved in Science for the People, helping to found the local chapter. With a handful of colleagues and friends, he took part in antiwar and anti-racist protests, including teach-ins, and even offered scientific and political assistance to North Vietnam.

Lewontin had many intellectual interests, but his work in emerging theories of race made an outsize impact on his profession and far beyond. Along with his collaborator J. L. Hubby, he revolutionized population genetics in a heralded 1966 scientific essay. Across the next forty years, he thoroughly challenged the pseudo-scientific construct of race. With this insight, Lewontin and his colleague Stephen Jay Gould refuted biological or evolutionary explanations of behavior patterns. As such, he assaulted the neo-Darwinians and the popular crypto-racist work of Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins in particular. In Not In Our Genes (1984), written with Steven Rose and Leo J. Kamin, he blasted claims that behavior traits, above all “intelligence,” could be measured across generations through IQ tests. More generally, and with more of the explicitly Marxist content that he claimed for his contribution, he described Darwin’s hypothesis as a particular Victorian vision of society projected into a universal theory. His collaboration with Richard Levins, another fellow Marxist and scientist, laid the basis for their popularly written and widely read text, The Dialectical Biologist (1986).

Following his move to Harvard, Lewontin collaborated with Stephen Jay Gould in arguing that various physical features, like the human chin, had evolved without any obvious survival usefulness. Put to use only later, through adaptation, these features’ obvious utility knocked down one more prop of biological determinism. Working with the Science for the People group in Boston, he co-founded the Socio-Biology Study Group, launching a collective effort against genetic reductionism and biological determinism. Thus Lewontin and his colleagues not only contested the ever-popular theories of “human nature” selfishness, racism, sexism, and homophobia as being “hard wired.” They suggested these traits arose specifically during class society.

Looking to the grim future of climate crisis, Lewontin also wrote influentially on the pseudo-science of agribusiness that compelled farmers to buy seeds each year for maximum and sustainable yields. This could be taken as his last major contribution.

“Richard Lewontin (1929-2021): a Scientist for the People,” on the Science for the People Website, July 21, 2021

Michael E. Staub. The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.