Table Of ContentThe Dialectical Biologist
■v
_THE
_ DIALECTICAL
BIOLOGIST
Richard Levins and
Richard Lewontin
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have
been chosen for strength and durability.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Levins, Richard.
The dialectical biologist.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Biology—Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Biology—Social aspects—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Lewontin, Richard C., 1929- II. Title.
QH331.L529 1985 574’.01 84-22451
ISBN 0-674-20281-3 (cloth)
ISBN 0-674-20283-X (paper)
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To Frederick Engels,
who got it wrong a lot of the time
but who got it right where it counted
Preface
I HIS BOOK has come into existence for both theoretical and practical
reasons. Despite the extraordinary successes of mechanistic reduction¬
ist molecular biology, there has been a growing discontent in the last
twenty years with simple Cartesian reductionism as the universal way
to truth. In psychology and anthropology, and especially in ecology,
evolution, neurobiology, and developmental biology, where the Carte¬
sian program has failed to give satisfaction, we hear more and more
calls for an alternative epistemological stance. Holistic, structuralist,
hierarchical, and systems theories are all offered as alternative modes
of explaining the world, as ways out of the cul-de-sacs into which re¬
ductionism has led us. Yet all the while there has been another active
and productive intellectual tradition, the dialectical, which is just now
becoming widely acknowledged.
Ignored and suppressed for political reasons, in no small part be¬
cause of the tyrannical application of a mechanical and sterile Stalinist
diamat, the term dialectical has had only negative connotations for
most serious intellectuals, even those of the left. Noam Chomsky once
remarked to one of us, who accused him in a conversation of being in¬
sufficiently dialectical, that he despised the term and that in its best
sense dialectics was only another way of saying “thinking correctly.”
Now dialectics has once again become acceptable, even trendy, among
intellectuals, as ancient political battles have receded into distant mem¬
ory. In psychology, anthropology, and sociology, dialectical schools
have emerged that trace their origins to Hegel. In biology a school of
dialectical analysis has announced itself as flowing from Marx rather
than directly from Hegel. Its manifesto, issued at the Bressanone Con¬
ference in 1981 by the Dialectics of Biology Group, began, “A strange
fate has overcome traditional Western philosophy of mind.” The Bres¬
sanone Conference did show the power of dialectical analysis as a cri-
viii PREFACE
tique of the current state of biological theory, although it left for the fu¬
ture the constructive application of a dialectical viewpoint to particular
problems and, indeed, an explicit statement of what the dialectical
method comprises.
As biologists who have been working self-consciously in a dialectical
mode for many years, we felt a need to illustrate the strength of the dia¬
lectical view in biology in the hope that others would find a compelling
case for their own intellectual reorientation. The essays in this book are
the result of a long-standing intellectual and political comradeship. It
began at the University of Rochester, where we worked together on
theoretical population genetics and took opposite views on the desir¬
ability of mixing mental and physical labor (a matter on which we now
agree). Later, working together at the University of Chicago and now
at Harvard, in Science for Viet Nam and Science for the People, we
have had more or less serious disagreements on intellectual and politi¬
cal tactics and strategy. But all the while, both singly and in collabora¬
tion, we have worked in a dialectical mode. Each of us separately has
published a book that is dialectical in its explication, in the formulation
of its problematic, and in the analysis of solutions (Richard Levins,
Evolution in Changing Environments [Princeton University Press,
1968]; Richard Lewontin, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change
[Columbia University Press, 1974]). We believe that the considerable
impact of these books, the one in ecology and the other in evolutionary
biology, is a confirmation of the power of dialectical analysis. Both
separately and together we have published scores of essays, applying
the dialectical method, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, to
scientific and political issues and to the relation of one to the other. In¬
deed, it is a sign of the Marxist dialectic with which we align ourselves
that scientific and political questions are inextricably interconnected—
dialectically related.
This book, then, is a collection of essays written at various times for
various purposes and should be treated by the reader accordingly. Ex¬
cept for their grouping under general categories, the chapters do not
have an ordered relation to one another. Material from some essays is
recapitulated in others. The book does not follow a single logical devel¬
opment from first page to last but rather is meant to be a sampler of a
mode of thought. That is why we have called it The Dialectical Biolo¬
gist rather than Dialectical Biology, which would announce a single co¬
herent project that we do not intend.
