THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST 11 III II I, 11 1 1 ni1 THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin AAKAR THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin Harvard University Press, 1985 Aakar Books for South Asia, 2009 Reprinted by arrangement with Harvard University Press, USA for sale only in the Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, Bhutan & Sri Lanka) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher First Published in India, 2009 ISBN 978-81-89833-77-0 (Pb) Published by AAKAR BOOKS 28 E Pocket IV, Mayur Vihar Phase I, Delhi-110 091 Phone : 011-2279 5505 Telefax : 011-2279 5641 [email protected]; www.aakarbooks.com Printed at S.N. Printers, Delhi-110 032 To Frederick Engels, who got it wrong a lot of the time but who got it right where it counted ,, " I 1 1■ 1-0 ■44 pH III lye II I! Preface THIS Bow( has come into existence for both theoretical andpractical 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 categolies, 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. od 1 PREFACE ix 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 photocopie 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 of- ten 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 dia- lectics is. Since the book is designed to be read by dissatisfied Carte- sians, 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 dialectics—only to dis- cover 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 con- sequence of its own contradictions. We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Bradie, whose se- vere 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. It!, t , I1 111111 M■ kl III !I if 11 1 1 11 Contents Introduction 1 One. On Evolution 1. Evolution as Theory and Ideology 9 2. Adaptation 65 3. The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution 85 TWo. On Analysis 4. The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes 109 5. Isidore Nabi on the Tendencies of Motion 123 6. Dialectics and Reductionism in Ecology 132 Three. Science as a Social Product and the Social Product of Science 7. The Problem of Lysenkoism 163 8. The Commoditization of Science 197 9. The Political Economy of Agricultural Research 209 10. Applied Biology in the Third World 225 11. The Pesticide System 238 12. Research Needs for Latin Community Health 242 13. What Is Human Nature? 253 Conclusion: Dialectics 267 Bibliography 291 Index 297 1.{141, it l.I 11 11111 The Dialectical Biologist Introduction THE VIEW of nature that dominates in our society has arisen as an ac- companiment 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 eigh- teenth, the structure of society has been inverted from one in which the qualities and actions of individuals were defined by their social posh tion to one in which, at least in principle and often in practice, individ- uals' activities determine their social relation. The change from a feu- dal world in which cleric and freeman, when they engaged in an exchange, were each subject to the laws and jurisdiction of his own sei- gneur, 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 market—this change has redefined the relation between the individual and the social. The social ideology of bourgeois society is that the individual is onto- logically prior to the social. Individuals are seen as freely moving social atoms, each with his or her own intrinsic properties, creating social in- teractions as they collide in social space.