Richard Lewontin: Why Knowing The Works And Legacy Of This American Evolutionary Biologist Is Important For Understanding How Left Controls The Academia

The legacy of Richard Lewontin (1929-2021), an important biologist who died on 4 July 2021, extends beyond his substantial contributions to the field of evolution.

If one wants to understand why the Left has a strong presence and control over academia, then understanding the works and legacy of Lewontin is important. Without such an understanding, we will only be stuck with rhetoric to confront the academic Left.

Through a three-part series, we will try and examine the importance of Lewontin to the academic Left by exploring his science and his politics.

In part one, this article, we will look at how his contributions shaped our understanding of evolution.

In part two, we explore how Lewontin's work on genetic diversity weakened the case for 'race' being a biological category by itself.

To begin with, Lewontin was not only a brilliant scientist but also an excellent science communicator. His writing bridged the gap between the core domain knowledge and the popular understanding of evolution. In the field of evolutionary studies, he shifted the focus to a dynamic way of looking at evolution, away from what he considered was adaptationist story-telling.

The usual understanding of evolution is that the selection pressures provided by the environment act on the organism and adaptation is that process by which the organisms become better suited to the environment.

Lewontin questioned this view of evolution. ‘The concept of adaptation’, he wrote, ‘implies a preexisting world that poses a problem to which an adaptation is the solution.’

Nevertheless, Lewontin accepted the factuality of adaptation. Pointing out how unrelated groups of animals like fish, seals, whales, penguins and sea snakes, have evolved functionally similar structures like fins, flippers, flukes, paddles and laterally flattened bodies respectively to deal with the selection pressure of moving efficiently in water, he stated that adaptation was a real phenomenon:

In 1979, Lewontin, along with another eminent evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote an essay that became quite famous for caricaturing adaptationism. ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’ became a kind of rage.

Spandrels are the neat geometric spaces one finds between arches in the Gothic Cathedrals, in this case, St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The architect creates a space where religious art gets added. The art is so exquisite that it is tempting to think of the space as being made specially for the art. But the art is an addition to a structure that is an architectural imperative. To think the other way is what adaptationists like Dawkins were doing and that was the ‘Panglossian paradigm’, named after Dr. Pangloss, a character created by Voltaire in his novel Candide to caricature Leibniz, the polymath mathematician.

As early as 1966, the Princeton University evolutionary biologist, George Williams, wrote his classical tome on adaptation and natural selection. In the very introduction, the student of evolution is handed this note of caution:

Richard Dawkins, in his foreword, to a later edition of George Williams' book, drew the attention to what he called the ‘overrated paper’ of Lewontin and Gould. The essay, Dawkins pointed out, because of its rhetorical nature, allowed itself to be misunderstood as a rejection of adaptation – a process well established in the field of biology.

Then paraphrasing Anglican marriage service Dawkins wrote:

Though both Lewontin and Gould were staunch evolutionists and were against creationism, this paper of theirs ended up getting awfully misquoted in creationist literature. In a way, what Gould and Lewontin did was the conventional political rhetorical strategy – to essentialize your opponent's view with the worst caricature of it possible and then dismiss it.