Biology as Ideology
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Pirate modeSince people are talking about Alon Levy's essay, Biology Is Not Ideology, a critique of Lewontin's Biology As Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, I thought I'd open up a thread for it here.
Maybe later, when I get a chance, I'll throw in my two cents about the book, too.
Oh, heck, here's a little bit of a critique.
I'm going to have to disagree completely with Alon—he has misread the book. He says he read it expecting to find it "full of cheap shots at science" and concludes that "Lewontin is a popularizer of anti-science". I have the advantage of being familiar with Lewontin's work, though. He is the Alexander Aggasiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. He has an incredible research record. He is most definitely not anti-science, anti-evolution, or anti-genetics—he has been a pioneer in those fields. He's a very smart cookie and a great writer. He also has his own biases—he's Marxist and proud of it—and isn't immune to error. But viewing this book through the lens of an assumption that Lewontin penned an anti-science screed has distorted his interpretations.
For instance, take a look at the conclusion of Lewontin's first chapter.
While these examples are meant to disillusion the reader about the objectivity and vision of transcendent truth claimed by scientists, they are not intended to be antiscientific or to suggest that we should give up science in favor of, say, astrology or thinking beautiful thoughts. Rather, they are meant to acquaint the reader with the truth about science as a social activity and to promote reasonable skepticism about the sweeping claims that modern science makes to an understanding of human existence. There is a difference between skepticism and cynicism, for the former can lead to action and the latter only to passivity. So these pages have a political end, too, which is to encourage the readers not to leave science to the experts, not to be mystified by it, but to demand a sophisticated scientific understanding in which everyone can share.
This mistake runs throughout Alon's essay. Over and over again, he accuses Lewontin of "attacking" science, for example,
Besides attacking the fundamental tenets of scientific research, the book also attacks certain specific concepts, which I will deal with now. First, I will talk about the heritability of IQ, which Lewontin denies; and then, I will defend the Human Genome Project, which he attacks as useless and ideological.
This is most peculiar. A biologist well known for the rigor of his research is attacking fundamental tenets of research? Where? You won't find it anywhere in Biology as Ideology, I'm afraid. Instead, Lewontin is criticizing flawed assumptions drawn from modern science.
IQ is a good example, but I'd rather not get into that long muddle right now. Alon makes a number of mistakes here, taking for granted that "heritability" means what he thinks it means ("heritability" is a very narrow, specific parameter in genetics, one that is frequently conveniently elided to new colloquial meanings by those who want to argue for racial theories of intelligence), that twin studies have adequately excluded environmental factors, and even that we can realistically dissociate the innate from the environmental. One of the things that Lewontin hammers on repeatedly is that latter misconception; it's one of the major ideological fallacies of much of modern biology.
Alon's claim that Lewontin attacks the HGP as useless is false, and that it is ideological is simply correct.
What Lewontin actually criticizes about the HGP are the claims that it will teach us "how life works" or that it will provide a "complete blueprint" for humanity. I suspect that he actually feels about genomic data as I do: it's a wonderful, powerful tool for comparative research, it tells us much about our genetic history, and it is a major aid for doing science, but it tells us nothing about individuals and has a long, long way to go before we understand all those other processes and interactions that are necessary for a cell to function. It's grossly incomplete.
Where ideology comes into play is in the reluctance to recognize that last fact. But of course ideology biases science. Of course economics and ideological expectations warp what kind of science gets funded. To deny that the Human Genome Project was driven by ideological issues is to deny reality. It doesn't mean it was useless or that we haven't gained anything from it. We should be aware that many of the central advocates of the HGP profited hugely from it. Ideology is everywhere, and it doesn't help to turn a blind eye to it.
For instance, Science recently published their Top 25 Questions Facing Science and one of them had me flabbergasted: Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes? That isn't a science question at all—it's more sociology than anything. It's all about the surprise to many scientists that we "only" had 25-30,000 genes. I run into these strange articles all the time where people try to rationalize this, as if it were some problem that fish and mustard plants have more genes than we do. But why should we expect people to have more genes than a pufferfish? Why is 25,000 considered too few—we don't even know what most of them do! Just the fact that one of the major science journals thinks this is a pressing issue tells you something.
I'm afraid I read Biology as Ideology and agreed with just about everything Lewontin said. But then, I didn't go into it assuming that he was "attacking" all of science. Rather, he's advocating a realistic examination of how the social enterprise of science impinges on the objective execution of science.
"What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth-century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy."
I see. So what Newton did was to take eighteenth-century political economy and apply it to the visible universe. Kind of the Adam Smith of cosmology. Gives a whole new meaning to the "Invisible Hand," doesn't it? (You know, "Who whacked me with that apple? Musta been the Invisible Hand of gravity!")