Richard Levins - The Dialectical Biologist

The Dialectical Biologist

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

10 9 8 7 6 5

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. BiologyPhilosophyAddresses, essays, lectures. 2. BiologySocial aspectsAddresses, 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)

To Frederick Engels,
who got it wrong a lot of the time
but who got it right where it counted

Preface

T HIS BOOK has come into existence for both theoretical and practical reasons. Despite the extraordinary successes of mechanistic reductionist 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 Cartesian 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 reductionism 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 because 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 insufficiently 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 memory. 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 Conference in 1981 by the Dialectics of Biology Group, began, A strange fate has overcome traditional Western philosophy of mind. The Bressanone Conference did show the power of dialectical analysis as a critique of the current state of biological theory, although it left for the future 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 dialectical 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 desirability 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 political tactics and strategy. But all the while, both singly and in collaboration, 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. Indeed, it is a sign of the Marxist dialectic with which we align ourselves that scientific and political questions are inextricably interconnecteddialectically related.

This book, then, is a collection of essays written at various times for various purposes and should be treated by the reader accordingly. Except 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 development 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 Biologist rather than Dialectical Biology , which would announce a single coherent project that we do not intend.

The particular essays we have chosen reflect a purely practical concern. Over the years much of what we have written has appeared in languages other than English and in publications not usually seen by biologists. We have repeatedly sent out photocopies of worn manuscripts, either in response to a request by someone who has heard a rumor of a certain essay or in an attempt to explicate a position. It seemed only sensible to collect these hard-to-find essays in one place, especially since they often represent the best expression of our point of view. We have taken the opportunity to do some editing. For the most part the changes are trivial, but in a few cases we have added some fresh material or inserted paragraphs from other essays to illuminate the argument. In one case, we have eliminated a large chunk of irrelevant didactic material.

After collecting these essays, we were dissatisfied. The assembled work illustrated the dialectical method, but it did not explain what dialectics is. Since the book is designed to be read by dissatisfied Cartesians, ought we not explicitly state our world view? Except for a sketch of it in The Problem of Lysenkoism, we nowhere touched on the subject. We then set about to write a chapter on dialecticsonly to discover that in twenty-five years of collaboration we had never discussed our views systematically! The final chapter in this book is an attempt to make explicit what had been implicit in our understanding. It is only a first attempt. Like everything else, it will develop in the future as a consequence of its own contradictions.

We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Bradie, whose severe criticism improved the last chapter. We are immensely grateful, too, to Becky Jones, who helped make manageable order from a chaos of manuscripts, revisions, and additions.

Contents

T HE VIEW of nature that dominates in our society has arisen as an accompaniment to the changing nature of social relations over the last six hundred years. Beginning sporadically in the thirteenth century and culminating in the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth, the structure of society has been inverted from one in which the qualities and actions of individuals were defined by their social position to one in which, at least in principle and often in practice, individuals activities determine their social relation. The change from a feudal world in which cleric and freeman, when they engaged in an exchange, were each subject to the laws and jurisdiction of his own seigneur, to a world in which buyer and seller confront each other, defined only by the transaction, and both subject to the same law merchant; from a world in which people were inalienably bound to the land, and the land to people, to a world in which each person owns his or her own labor power to sell in a competitive marketthis change has redefined the relation between the individual and the social.