PZ Myers. 2005 Jul 02. Biology as Ideology. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/biology_as_ideology/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Saturday, July 02, 2005
Biology as Ideology
Since 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.
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"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!") -
The influence the economic thought of Malthus had on Darwin is not exactly controversial.
#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/02 at 02:15 PM
- Arrrgh. I was just about to start doing my own deconstruction of Alon's piece. You scooped me. If I feel I have something to add, I'll do it later tonight (Junior is back from camp and wants to use the computer....).
- I don't think Darwin's bourgeois perspective on evolution is at all controversial -- nor is it entirely wrong, nor does it invalidate the theory. Most importantly, Lewontin doesn't use that fact to argue against evolution, but rather to point out that it has led us to an incomplete picture of what evolution means to humanity.
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Coturnix, there is much left to do. I just whipped out a hasty overview, but there is much more to tear apart.
Nothing personal, Alon, but I think your "Lewontin hates Science!" glasses really warped your interpretation. -
Rather, he's advocating a realistic examination of how the social enterprise of science impinges on the [bug-word removed] execution of science.
Well, I haven't read the book, so that lack is going to hamper how much I can say about Alon's interpretation. And in the previous thread, I pointed out several examples of where I thought Alon had overlooked examples of science being colored by the overlying social structures, and how that omission accordingly weakens his argument.
Nevertheless, I do think Alon makes an important point in itself, although reading PZ's critique, it may well be that this point is misapplied to Lewontin. In our earlier "Loon" thread, we were talking about mistrust in science in the New Age community. I think that as humans we have a selection bias toward negative examples, and so examples of the type I cited tend to bias the public (at least, some of it) against science more than the eventual correction pressures or the majority of ethical scientists bias the public toward science.
So I read Alon's essay as an appeal for separation of the good and self-correcting parts of science from the policy aspects that can often be misapplied. I don't think that can ever be totally done--certainly not to the degree Alon implies, by overlooking many examples--but to the extent that it can be, I think it's worth keeping in mind as one tool to counter the anti-scientific biases I mentioned above. -
If you want to see something very fun from Richard Lewontin, check out his review of Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World. After reading it, I wondered why he didn't quit his job and become some TV evangelist's lackey.
After describing an evolution-creationism debate, he went on to argue that what he was seeing in creationists was some sort of class struggle, with fundies adopting creationism as a proletarian revolt against bourgeois big-city evolutionists.
Marxist jargon:
proletarian = working class = "good guys"
bourgeois = capitalist class = "bad guys"
The class-conflict thesis is an interesting question to consider, especially if one gets away from the Marxist dichotomy of proletariat/bourgeoisie, but it must be said that there is a such thing as objective truth. There is also the question of why creationists are not also championing geocentrism or flat-earthism or exorcism or salivary therapy (don't laugh -- it's in the Gospels).
And he seemed to imply that the creationists' professional credentials somehow give legitimacy to their viewpoints. As if the absolute shoddiness of their "science" is somehow irrelevant.
He also kvetches at Sagan for the uncompromising rationalism that he expresses -- but what would he prefer? Consulting astrologers to help design lab experiments?
He makes a big fuss about how cancer has been such a hard nut to crack, but I fail to see how that's an argument that all of modern science has been an abject failure. We have not been completely successful, but we have nevertheless not been complete failures.
He sneers that
Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them?
I invite him to go to a beach and make some sand castles and teach himself a lesson in emergent properties -- collectives of sand grains have some properties very different from those of individual sand grains.
Toward the end, he seems to be making a plea for scientists to incorporate gods and demons and so forth into their hypotheses; he ought to address the question of how those hypotheses would be tested.#: Posted by on 07/02 at 04:44 PM -
Originally posted by Chris
The influence the economic thought of Malthus had on Darwin is not exactly controversial.
I'm not saying Malthus didn't influence Darwin; I'm saying that it's insane to comment on why Darwinism became the dominant paradigm without ever mentioning Darwin's journey on the Beagle.
Now, on to the discussion in the other thread:
Originally posted by Chris
I agree with the criticism Larry and Raven make. I also think you're too quick to relegate reflexive reductionism to the rubbishheap of history. There are plenty of reductionists still walking the earth. (Dawkins, anyone?)
Well, science is reductionistic. The idea is to simply but not to oversimplify, whereas Lewontin says science does oversimplify. But despite what he says, even genocentrists realize that the way genes supposedly control behavior is very, very complex. Remember: ultimately biology is reducible to 57 elementary particles - or even fewer, depending on what theory of quantum gravity one subscribes to - but nobody even bothers doing that because doing that is too complicated and will produce such a high-resolution image that nobody will be able to make sense of it.
Originally posted by Larry
Alon, in the essay you link to you claim:
in the last four hundred years, there have been exactly two cases of science being subservient to the dominant social structure
which is just silly. Lysenko? In the US, there were wildly dubious medical theories which legitimated slave-owners' customs and practices, like the lung disease which made slaves run away, best treated by repeated blows to the back...
[indenting changed to italics because of nesting problems]
Originally postedby Raven
There are many more than just two cases, Alon--the Tuskegee syphilis study, Pernkopf's anatomical atlas, nuclear testing without notification of populations in the US Southwest and in Micronesia, suppression of negative research findings by government or corporations (like Vioxx), continued practice by physicians and remuneration by insurance companies of treatments backed by little or no evidence (certain orthopedic surgical procedures, for example)--I could enumerate them all day, but no one here has time for that.
I am not including scientific fraud like Bezwoda here, because that is a renegade scientist, who was outed and rejected by the scientific community. Rather, I confine myself to the practice by established scientists of research that is less than faithful to the principle of scientific truth above every other consideration, and that is practiced in such as way as to reinforce existing social structures.
If your point is that, like Semmelweis, the truth is ultimately vindicated by science, I'd buy that, in most cases at least. But getting to that point of vindication is often full of sociopolitical obstacles which science can and does temporarily reinforce, sometimes for decades.
What I mean is that there have been two occasions in which the entire establishment was geared to proving a political point. I know about Lysenko, but Lysenko was never part of mainstream biology; eugenicists, however, were mainstream biology for a few decades, and anthropology started as an attempt to rigorously show the supremacy of European cultures over non-European ones.
For the same reasons I did not include unethical experiments on humans, such as the Tuskegee experiment and nuclear testing. Lewontin brings up eugenics to show that science is simply a way to legitimize the prevailing social structure. The Tuskegee experiment was not such an attempt; rather, it was an immoral occasion on which scientists put the quest for knowledge above unimportant things such as basic morals or rudimentary care for human beings or not treating black people as lab animals. It is therefore outside the scope of Lewontin's argument.
As for financial influence on research, I admit that in the article. I say that Lewontin attacks science on several grounds, one of which is financial interests, and I explicitly say I refrain from attacking Lewontin there. Funding influences science; on many occasions corporate or government funding skews research; and it's important to investigate these money trails.
More on everything that later - it's 7:15 am here and I'm *still* awake. Right I'll only briefly touch on two of your points, PZ, namely the one about the number of genes and the one about why I think Lewontin is anti-science.
The question, "Why do humans have so few genes?" is relevant because a) researchers presumed the number was closer to 100,000, and b) it is related to the way multiple genes create multiple proteins.
As for why I think Lewontin is anti-science, it's because of his essay about legitimization. When someone writes in length about how science's main purpose is to legitimize the dominant social structure, an assertion that will send every political scientist up in a burst of laughter, I reserve the right to call him anti-scientific. Talking about why science isn't objective isn't the worst problem in Biology as Ideology; trying to argue that science's purpose is to legitimize an ideology is. -
a) Why did researchers presume the number was 100,000 though? b) Alternative splicing is only the latest excuse to increase the number. Honestly, it's the weirdest thing: a lot of scientists are convinced it has to be greater than the number the HGP has come up with, and I don't know why. A small part of it has to be the financial aspect (remember a few years ago, when they were selling options on genes?), but there seems to be some deep need to amplify the complexity of humans for some mysterious reason.
Umm, you're doing it again. Lewontin does not claim that the main purpose of science is to legitimize the dominant social structure--and you'd have to be blind to pretend that science isn't used to that end.
Maybe part of the problem here is that you are confusing Science, the process, with Science, the social institution. Lewontin is criticizing the latter, and trying hard to explain that the two aren't identical. -
Of course, Alon Levy has on this blog referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the founder of the Southern CHRISTIAN Leadership Conference -- as an outspoken atheist, so I'm not surprised he would misrepresent someone so badly.
#: Posted by on 07/02 at 06:23 PM
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...there seems to be some deep need to amplify the complexity of humans for some mysterious reason.
Scala naturae dies hard. -
PZ Myers: a) Why did researchers presume the number was 100,000 though? b) Alternative splicing is only the latest excuse to increase the number. Honestly, it's the weirdest thing: a lot of scientists are convinced it has to be greater than the number the HGP has come up with, and I don't know why.
Just to hazard a guess, I'd bet it is a lack of understanding of the developmental influences the new (as in young) organism has on gene expression. For instance, Pettigrew (sp?) in Oz noted that fruitbats (Megachiropteran sp.) see color and have a visual system much like primates. Ergo (with other elements such as penis type, wing attachment, diet, etc.) they should be primates!
Well, OK, and I would love to be in an order that flew naturally (Messrs. Potter, Weasley, etc. aside). But it makes no real sense in that small changes (frugivores are usually color sensitive) in gene structure can, at the end point, develop an entirely different CNS than the more closely related Micorchiropterans. Small initial genetic differences will have neurons sniffing out new connections.
So animals' phenotypic structure can, and does, confuse folk normally dedicated to clear analysis. Look also to the chimp/ape/human relationship issue.
This is not really bad. One must start with what is seen. But to go no further is indeed an error. Here I think the scientists were flabbergasted by the complexity, failed to think past the genome into the 'genome in development', and viola, 100K genes required to be a speaking, tool using, industrial and culture loving African ape based creature. Compared to the other creatures, solely on the behavioral complexity, it could be seen as reasonable, though now known as flat wrong.#: Posted by John M. Price on 07/02 at 08:08 PM -
I have read "Biology as Ideology" about 10 years ago. I remember reading it outdoors, while grilling, and burning a steak as a result. I wish I could re-read it quickly to refresh my memory. I wish I could find it in this mess! I kept out growing library in immaculate order for 12 years (non-fiction by topic, fiction by author). However, the last move resulted in 5000 books hap-hazardly packed into a space that is too small for a library of that size and as a result it takes hours to find anything....grrrrrr! I guess I'll have to rely on my memory, as well as on the fact that I have read several other books by Lewontin and tended to agree with each one for teh most part.
If I remember correctly, the book was a printing of his lectures that were given to the people who already were evolutionary biologists, or at least academics who do not doubt evolution. As an evolutionary biologist himself, speaking to people who were not liable to be swayed by creationist arguments, Lewontin had no need to stress that evolution is true - that was a given. He also, for this crowd, did not need to waste his time on the Beagle story - everyone in his audience knew the details of Darwin's biography already - that was also a given. Heck, all the kids who graduate from 8th grade where I come from know the Beagle story by heart....
Thus, omitting defense of evolution as fact, and omitting the relevance of Galapagos do not mean he believes those are irrelevant. They were only irrelevant to the particular topic of his lectures collected in this book. That is why they are missing - they were not the point of the book. He is discussing the social aspects of science while everything else is a given.
I have not heard any serious Darwinian scholar, no matter what political persuasion (and that includes Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Right), denying the importance of the 19th century England zeitgeist on the formation of Darwin's theory. Sure, he has read Spencer later (and did not read Das Kapital - the pages of his copy with Marx's autograph are still uncut). But Spencer is not important here. Spencer took Darwinism and applied it forcefully to society.
What mattered for the formation of the theory were Malthus and Adam Smith. The novelty of Darwin's theory of evolution (as opposed to, e.g., Erasmus Darwin, Chambers or Lamarck before him) is the ecological view, or, as Mayr put it - "population thinking".
Instead of thinking about individuals, Darwin thought about ecosystems. Observing the nature in the tropics (instead of peaceful English meadows) certainly helped him focus there. People with experience in tropical travels (e.g., Wallace, Bates, Muller etc.) had their minds "best primed" for the reception of the Origin and were the first to immediately accept the theory when it came out (and the first to apply it to research).
Yet, observing the tropics was not enough. Many travelled to the tropics and never thought of evolution. What Darwin did was look at the tropical ecosystems with Adam Smith and Malthus on his mind. He was a child of 19th century capitalism, he was steeped in the economic literature of the day, and he made direct parallels between nature as he saw it and the society as seen from the prism of the prevailing ideology of the times. One cannot shed one's cultural baggage and biases when doing science. After all, the principle of natural selection is extremely simple. It is so simple there is no reason why ancient Greeks or Egyptians could not have thought of it. Yet they did not. The understanding of the world, especially understanding of a complex system - the human society being the most obvious and readily available example - has to be conducive for such discoveries. The 19th century England understanding of the human society was conducive to the discovery of the principle of natural selection. Feudalism or Stalinism are not.
However, there are aspects of the evolutionary theory that were less visible and thwarted by the very same 19th century capitalist view of the world. This view persisted until at least mid-20th century in the West. Some of those aspects are: undue stress on competition and downplaying cooperation; male-centric theory of sexual selection; progressivism (time's arrow) and related to that the equation of "fit" with "good", which led to eugenics; matemathization of biology that led to elimination of the organism and especially embryonic development of the organism from the mainstream evolutionary theory, etc. This is what Lewontin's treatise is about. (Btw, for the non-social, biological side of that, read this book). -
Lewontin distinguishes between methodological reductionism and philosophical reductionism. He practices the former and warns against the latter. Alon writes:
The greedy reductionist view that Lewontin attacks is two hundred years dead, and when it was alive it only concerned itself with mechanics.
. It is not dead. It is alive and kicking, see Dawkins, Dennett, EP.... While Dawkins, pushed by critics and the evidence has inched back step by step (and yes, his books have gotten somewhat less ridiculous over time) he has not made the final step because if he did there would be nothing left as Dawkinsian - he would just plain agree with the rest of the world, i.e., there would be no difference between Dawkins' understanding of the world and that of more sophisticated modern thinkers and biologists. He cannot make that step because he has staked his name and his career on being different. Even when he accepts a point, he tends to rename it and present as his own insight. The most telling renaming he did was turning David Hull's "interactors" into "vehicles" which suggests that he has not abandoned the genocentric (philosophically, not methodologically reductionist) view of the world. -
Alon writes: <blockquote>He claims that there is a fairly old idea that blood will tell, which biologists inherited from popular beliefs. His primary piece of evidence for that is the plot of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, wherein the idea is that Oliver was so out of place in his poor milieu because his biological parents were rich. This argument, however, doesn't stand up to even casual scrutiny; Oliver Twist was written between 1837 and 1839, almost thirty years before Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance. If Oliver Twist is an argument against modern genetic paradigms, then Asimov's Robot series is an argument against modern artificial intelligence paradigms, which it isn't. Further literary and theatrical works Lewontin produces postdate Mendel but not by enough; it took about 35 years for the scientific community to rediscover Mendel's discovery and about 30 more to start to synthesize genetics and evolution.<blockquote>
What does Mendel have to do with anything here? Nobody is talking about mechanism of inheritance ("genetics"), just about fact of inheritance. Darwin used the observable fact of inheritance to build his theory many years before discovery and rediscovery of Mendel - with great success. Actually, Dickens HAS to predate Mendel if we are to use him for the analysis. Oliver Twist (and many other examples) demonstrate to us that people in Western Europe in the early 19th century, during the time that Darwin was building his theory, believed that nature trumps nurture. It was important that they did NOT know genetics. Where did they get the idea then, if Mendel was not born yet? From feudal ideology (tracing back to ancient times, of course) still present in European blood aristocracy and in the process of being repackaged and tranferred to capitalist ideology of the time. -
I'm saying that it's insane to comment on why Darwinism became the dominant paradigm without ever mentioning Darwin's journey on the Beagle.
I haven't read Lewontin. But of course it is completely appropriate to write an analysis of the spread of the hypothesis of natural selection throughout the scientific community without mentioning the Beagle voyage. To say otherwise is just silly. As an editor, I'd assume that time spent recounting the basics of Darwin's biography would be time wasted, as startlingly few of the readers of Lewontin's book would not be familiar with the story in far greater detail than would be possible to portray as supporting material in a book.
Further - and here is where you tread into the same territory occupied by creationists - the Galapagos visit was entirely incidental to Darwin's thought. Darwin was a naturalist, and spent his life observing and describing organisms. Though the Galapagos finches are an excellent synecdoche for inherited variation refined by natural selection, those finches could just as easily have been Falklands penguins, borage family plants in the Canary Islands, or freshwater fish in the Thames. Or birds of paradise in the Indonesian Archipelago with Wallace observing rather than Darwin.
That 19th century political economist you scoff at, contrariwise, provided the central insight allowing Darwin to put together his theory:
"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work".
- From Darwin's autobiography.
"Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work." Darwin himself credits Malthus with the core of his hypothesis.#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/02 at 10:20 PM -
The link provided by Loren (comment #30608) is excellent, though I think that Loren is misunderstanding it. It is from NY Review of Books, targeting the readership of NYRB who knows very well that Lewontin, a regular contributor there, is a premier evolutionary biologist, atheist and a rational kind of person. He has no space there, nor intention, to defend rationalism in his essay.
He obviously liked Sagan and Sagan's book, yet points to a deep philosophical split between himself and Sagan: Sagan belongs to a group of people who believes that education and FACTS, if provided, are in themselves sufficient to change minds, while Lewontin, being better versed in sociology and psychology, thinks it is not that simple. Regulars on this blog, as well as on Panda's Thumb etc., always throw facts and information at visiting creationist commenters and get very frustrated when the facts do not change opinions.
There is a similar division in the current Democratic party: people who think that if only media reported the truth every single American would vote against Bush and people who realize that when encountering cognitive dissonance between one's core worldview (built via environment in which parental childrearing philosophy is key) and the facts, people disbelieve the facts. The most important contribution of George Lakoff is not so much "framing" as is the notion, strange to coastal liberals, that Truth Will Not Set You Free. Lewontin, at the end of that article, actually states this same message: Truth Will Not Set You Free, and wonders how can we change people's minds in a such a way that they start accepting the facts. -
Remember: ultimately biology is reducible to 57 elementary particles - or even fewer, depending on what theory of quantum gravity one subscribes to - but nobody even bothers doing that because doing that is too complicated and will produce such a high-resolution image that nobody will be able to make sense of it.
Alon, it is simply not true that biology can be reduced in that way. We know here that animals can't be reduced to their genes -- that all sorts of extra-sequential information is required to get from genes to proteins, and then from proteins to phenotypes.
Then to get from individuals to ecology requires a whole new science, taking new causal factors into account.
And I believe that even the detailed reduction of chemistry to physics is more complicated than I ingorantly suppose. Certainly, John Sulston, who trained as a chemist, does not believe it has been done.#: Posted by Andrew Brown on 07/03 at 01:34 AM -
The link provided by Loren (comment #30608) is excellent, though I think that Loren is misunderstanding it. It is from NY Review of Books, targeting the readership of NYRB who knows very well that Lewontin, a regular contributor there, is a premier evolutionary biologist, atheist and a rational kind of person. He has no space there, nor intention, to defend rationalism in his essay.
That might very well be true, but in that case, it's sloppy writing. One can't asume that readers of a newspaper or magazine knows your opinion, as the readership is everchanging. When one present arguments that is based on such knowledge, one should always at least make a small scetch of the presumed knowldge, so the readers have the right framework for reading the article.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 01:43 AM -
Raven wrote:
In our earlier "Loon" thread, we were talking about mistrust in science in the New Age community. I think that as humans we have a selection bias toward negative examples, and so examples of the type I cited tend to bias the public (at least, some of it) against science more than the eventual correction pressures or the majority of ethical scientists bias the public toward science.
I don't believe we have a selection bias towards negative examples, otherwise how would you explain all the annecdotal evidence given? I can't really say what we have instead, but it's something else.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 01:47 AM -
Coming from a Southern Baptist background, I know all too well how difficult it can be to leave your lifelong predispositions behind. Just because you have all the proof in the world doesn't make it any easier to admit to yourself that your world-view is skewed.
Take for instance Kurt Wise PhD, who apparantly stated that "Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture...if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate."
Granted this quote is taken from an article by Dawkins, (http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_21_4.html) but it nonetheless illustrates the point that irrefutable evidence and logical arguments will not be sufficient to alter deep-seated beliefs held for generations. Faith has never had anything to do with the justifiable proof of anything,...that is, other than the undeniable willingness of the believer to misguide themself or anyone else in ear-shot.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 02:31 AM -
The basic problem here is that Lewontin knows nothing about history or political science. It takes ignorance to believe that the 19th century's dominant political view was law of the jungle capitalism; this only became dominant toward the end of the century, and even then the naive progressive ideology that dominated until about 1860 only properly died in 1914 with the onset of World War One. It takes even more ignorance not to know what the source of the modern state's legitimacy is.
Umm, you're doing it again. Lewontin does not claim that the main purpose of science is to legitimize the dominant social structure--and you'd have to be blind to pretend that science isn't used to that end.
Actually, Lewontin does claim that this is the primary purpose of science. I'm basing this observation on the following quotes:
1. "What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth-century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy" (p. 10).
2. "Science... is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch" (p. 9).
3. "So, the ideology of modern science, including modern biology, makes the atom or individual the causal source of all the properties of larger collections" (p. 13).
4. "This [biological determinism] is the view that the old society was chatacerized by artifical barriers to equality, whereas the new society allows a natural sorting process to decide who is to get the status, wealth, and power and who is not" (p. 20).
Every single one of these quotes is false; the first three are also marks of an anti-scientific crackpot.
Saying that Darwin applied politics to biology is inexcusable without saying anything about the fact that he had evidence. It's common among some people, especially libertarians, to weigh views based on their form, so for example liberalism and conservatism are hypocritical because of their insistence of using the government for certain roles but not others. But this view is plainly untenable; one has to consider the substance of a view. Lewontin doesn't even say something like, "Because he subscribed to Malthus's views, it was easier for Darwin to make sense of the Galápagos fauna."
Repeatedly insisting science reinforces dominant social values doesn't make it so. Sometimes it does, as in the case of eugenics. But the modern IQ debate shows that it doesn't always, because of the proliferation of alternative models, such as the seven intelligences. Cognitive science in general is non-ideological even though it has some social implications. Malthus was a contrarian, the dominant view at the time being much more optimistic, so Darwinism won out despite being at odds with contemporary notions of unbridled progress. Physicists rejected Newtonian mechanics in favor of relativity even though Newtonian mechanics is the epitome of reductionism and much of reductionist philosophy was built around it.
Saying that modern science is reductionistic because of ideology is plain wrong. At most, one can say that this is a view in science, like Gouldianism or Dawkinsianism. But there is a difference between a scientific view and an ideology; in particular, scientific reductionism helped political individualism gain traction but not vice versa. Reductionism got accepted in science because of its own merits.
While some use biological determinism to promote authoritarian views - pseudoscientific racists come to mind - this view is very inefficient as a legitimizer of social structures. In the modern West, people don't like to believe that some people are inherently better than others. And indeed, mainstream conservatism and all of libertarianism prefers to justify inequality on moral reasons: the poor are poor because of moral failure. After all, according to the American Dream, everyone who wants to succeed in the United States can by working hard and following the rules. The moral-failure myth accords with that by positing that the poor are lazy and don't want to succeed, whereas the natural-hierarchy myth doesn't because it violates the tenets of freedom and choice.
Furthermore, there is Lewontin's no-practical-uses argument. This is the weakest argument in the book; Lewontin has to resort to plain falsities, such as that in the last 50 years life expectancy at 60 rose by 4 months in the United States (the actual figure is 4 years and 11 months between 1940 and 1990). Why would he try to show that basic research is useless in practice? What reason does a pro-science person have to paint science as useless enterprise? There is his beef with the Human Genome Project, which he has the cheek to compare to faith healing in Loren's article. But that's not enough; he has enough arguments against the HGP without needing to resort to belittling the practical merits of scientific research.
The fact that he's a scientist doesn't make him automatically pro-science. Nonreligious forms of anti-intellectualism are strongest among educated people and are well-represented among intellectuals. Post-modernism began not with students fed up with their professors but with established scholars and philosophers. Austrian economists are as anti-economics as possible because of their insistence that using facts is statistical economics, which is useless; many were professors of economics at prestigious institutions. At the beginning of the Enlightenment, it was philosophers rather than scientists who dismantled the stranglehold philosophy had on intellectualism. Given that, it's easily possible for a Harvard biologist to be anti-science.
Of course, Alon Levy has on this blog referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the founder of the Southern CHRISTIAN Leadership Conference -- as an outspoken atheist, so I'm not surprised he would misrepresent someone so badly.
Where did I ever say that? All I said is that MLK would probably support equal rights for atheists.
He also, for this crowd, did not need to waste his time on the Beagle story - everyone in his audience knew the details of Darwin's biography already - that was also a given. Heck, all the kids who graduate from 8th grade where I come from know the Beagle story by heart....
So why did he publish that as a popular book? Besides, saying that Darwin deliberately applied Malthusianism to biology gives a skewed picture of reality, in which Darwinian theory was based on politics rather than on evidence. Reread the long blockquoted quote of Sokal at the beginning of my article; Darwinism is a good example of good science informed by a political view, because Darwin's primary argument was not, "this is how capitalism works, only in biology," but, "this accords with how archipelago animals diverge." If On the Origin of Species had begun with an account of how to apply economic capitalism to biology, and if biologists had accepted Darwinism primarily on philosophical grounds, then it would have been a completely different thing; but it doesn't and they didn't.
The 19th century England understanding of the human society was conducive to the discovery of the principle of natural selection. Feudalism or Stalinism are not.
But you claim that one must observe tropical fauna to see Darwinism in action; how many naturalists traveled to the tropics before, say, 1800? Also, note that 19th-century England was an Enlightenment society, whereas feudal Europe was not.
What does Mendel have to do with anything here?
It's crucial because anything predating him is as relevant to modern genetics as I, Robot is to modern AI research. By the same token I can reach similar insane conclusions about how cognitive science is simply an attempt to legitimize a certain language-centric view of cognition and use Asimov's three rules of robotics as an example of that. In fact every science evolved as an attempt to discover something, so many if not all sciences were preceded by utterly wrong ideas (e.g. Oliver Twist, alchemy, Asimov's laws of robotics).
As I say in my article: "eugenics' history actually underscores one of the aspects of the academia, namely that it is liable to believe certain things based on prejudice, but when there is strong evidence to the contrary, the facts win out." Whatever prejudice there was about inheritance before anyone knew anything about it is quite irrelevant. It's as relevant as alchemy to chemistry or the Asimovian view of robots to cognitive science.
The link provided by Loren (comment #30608) is excellent, though I think that Loren is misunderstanding it. It is from NY Review of Books, targeting the readership of NYRB who knows very well that Lewontin, a regular contributor there, is a premier evolutionary biologist, atheist and a rational kind of person. He has no space there, nor intention, to defend rationalism in his essay.
There's no way to get around the fact that Lewontin considers creationists a somehow oppressed minority ("The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism"). There's no way to get around, "If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn."
Further - and here is where you tread into the same territory occupied by creationists - the Galapagos visit was entirely incidental to Darwin's thought. Darwin was a naturalist, and spent his life observing and describing organisms. Though the Galapagos finches are an excellent synecdoche for inherited variation refined by natural selection, those finches could just as easily have been Falklands penguins, borage family plants in the Canary Islands, or freshwater fish in the Thames. Or birds of paradise in the Indonesian Archipelago with Wallace observing rather than Darwin.
So if it weren't the Beagle journey, it'd be something else. Still the point is that Darwinism stood on its own merits, not on these of Adam Smith or Thomas Malthus. -
The fact that he's a scientist doesn't make him automatically pro-science.
Richard Lewontin: "Hello, I'm Richard Lewontin, I'm an evoloutionary biologist engaged in research at Harvard University."
Alon Levy: "YOU ARE ANTI-SCIENCE! YOUR ARGUMENTS ARE INSANE!"
(Feel me to correct me if I've missed anything important about Alon's argument).#: Posted by on 07/03 at 05:49 AM -
Should be:
(Feel free to correct me if I've missed anything important about Alon's argument).
But, hey, feel me too, readers.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 05:51 AM -
(Feel free to correct me if I've missed anything important about Alon's argument).
Except for the entire argument, you didn't miss anything.
(I was one paragraph away from completing a response to your original post, PZ, when Windows 98 crashed). -
From Loren Petrich's comment:
Lewontin sneers,
Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them?
I invite him to go to a beach and make some sand castles and teach himself a lesson in emergent properties -- collectives of sand grains have some properties very different from those of individual sand grains.
Toward the end, he seems to be making a plea for scientists to incorporate gods and demons and so forth into their hypotheses; he ought to address the question of how those hypotheses would be tested.
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While I have not read Lewontin's book either (it is now on my list), I must say that Lewontin most likely is not "sneering". Rather, he is showing the attitude, often unspoken, of the general public toward science. I have observed the phenomenon myself when talking to people at my church (they are fundies, I am not) and debating my friends at work. Americans are in general ignorant of the advances made in science since 1850. They accept that a TV works, but have no idea HOW. They know that reporduction works, but are largely ignorant of meiosis, etc.
We need to address the fact that education does seem somewhat lacking in terms of required classes at the elementary and high-school levels. There is also the matter of attitude toward education expressed by students and their parents. The Jerry Springer Show provides some interesting anecdotal evidence for that.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 06:52 AM - Alon Levy does seem to have a case, now I'll have to go read Lewontin to decide for myself.
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Except for the entire argument, you didn't miss anything.
Don't flatter yourself. Has it occurred to you that denouncing a research professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard (i.e. one producing an ongoing stream of scientific research) as having the arguments of 'an anti-scientific crackpot' when other scientists (a) think your reading is quite, quite wrong, (b) when your views on the subject are so extreme as to use incendiary terms like the above, plus terms like "insane".
Surely some sort of introspection is called for?
"Hmmmm, I seem to be using very extreme language, I'm calling a research scientist at Harvard anti-scientific, and there are these scientists disagreeing with my reading ... Could I be wrong.... Nah! Couldn't be me!"
By the way, just as a note to how wrong you've got it: 'Saying that modern science is reductionistic because of ideology is plain wrong' ?! Look, you've got a nice writing style, but on the basis of this I doubt you'd be much use at attaching a horse to a cart.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 07:33 AM -
Okay, let’s try again, PZ, now without Windows 98 killing my reply.
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.
What I’m talking about is Lewontin’s criticism of objectivity and empiricism. If you read what, say, Alan Sokal says about science and objectivity, you’ll see he admits that science can be swayed by financial or other interests and says it’s important to investigate these influences. But Lewontin goes far beyond that; he claims that the scientific principles of objectivity and empiricism are flawed by asserting that science as an institution is inherently non-objective and non-empirical.
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.
When I say “heritability,” I’m essentially quoting previous studies about the heritability of IQ. I presume that Eric Turkhemier used heritability in the precise genetic sense when he concluded that the heritability of IQ was 0.1 for families of low socioeconomic status and 0.72 for families of middle and high SES. This study, if true, refutes not just the environment-only hypothesis Lewontin advocates but also the racist and classist hypotheses that Lewontin claims underlie IQ research. Incidentally, this study circumvents all of Lewontin’s criticisms about properly controlling for environmental factors, because what matters most about it is the fact that there’s a huge difference between low-SES heritability and middle- and high-SES heritability. After all, if an improperly controlled for effect inflates heritability, it should inflate heritability equally regardless of class. To attack this study’s control factors you must find factors that exist only or almost only in middle- and high-SES families.
Alon's claim that Lewontin attacks the HGP as useless is false, and that it is ideological is simply correct.
Can you explain what ideology guided the HGP? Note that scientific views are different from ideologies, so to show that genetic determinism is an ideology rather than a scientific view you need to show that its proponents use it to justify a political ideology. For example, Richard Herrnstein is a good example of someone who does, whereas Richard Dawkins is a good example of someone who doesn’t.
Let me quote coturnix here: “While Dawkins, pushed by critics and the evidence has inched back step by step (and yes, his books have gotten somewhat less ridiculous over time) he has not made the final step because if he did there would be nothing left as Dawkinsian - he would just plain agree with the rest of the world, i.e., there would be no difference between Dawkins' understanding of the world and that of more sophisticated modern thinkers and biologists.” This is a prime example of how a scientist’s ego influences his work. But it isn’t ideology; Dawkins would only be guilty of subordinating science to ideology if he used his genetic determinism to justify inequality or ram religion (which he doesn’t—he uses memetics for that).
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.
Maybe Lewontin feels that way, but he certainly doesn’t give the impression in Biology as Ideology. He attacks basic research, arguing that it has no practical uses. Whereas he finishes the first chapter with a moderating comment (despite the chapter’s body being scathing and caustic), he only intensifies his criticism at the end of the fourth chapter, which deals with the HGP.
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.
Lewontin claims a lot more than that. Sokal says exactly what you’re saying here in the caveats to his defense of science. Lewontin claims that science is inherently ideological, which is different from saying it can be subject to ideology. On the contrary, on page 8 Lewontin derides a view only slightly weaker than yours: “scientists truly believe that except for the unwanted intrusions of ignorant politicians, science is above the social fray”—note that this is meant to contrast what scientists believe and how things really happen. The sort of ideological warping of the scale Lewontin says happens hasn’t happened since eugenics was abandoned.
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.
Lewontin claims exactly that—he says that basic science, which includes the HGP, has no medical applications. -
Don't flatter yourself. Has it occurred to you that denouncing a research professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard (i.e. one producing an ongoing stream of scientific research) as having the arguments of 'an anti-scientific crackpot' when other scientists (a) think your reading is quite, quite wrong, (b) when your views on the subject are so extreme as to use incendiary terms like the above, plus terms like "insane".
Which part of "in this article I will mostly refrain from attacking Lewontin's biology" did you fail to understand? The book is predominantly about social science - how science is done and how it relates to social structures, to be precise - with biology only providing the backdrop. Lewontin is as qualified to talk about legitimization as Larry Summers is to talk about gender differences in cognition or Noam Chomsky is to talk about foreign policy. -
I had the interesting (to put it one way) experience of covering Biology as Ideology</b> in a graduate level "science studies" course. Alon's criticisms are exactly to the money if those sympathetic to postmodernism in my class were representative; moreover, I agree with the interpretation of some of the more egregious passages. (Though I think the book is not quite as bad as Alon makes out.) What really struck me when I read it (going on memory here) was the claim that there was no known genetic basis for any disease or condition that affected human behaviour. I happen to own a genetics text that was coauthored by Lewontin himself. Guess what: the behavioural effects of trisomy 21 (aka Down's Syndrome) are discussed. I wondered at the time why on earth he would make such a claim in the popularization. (The Massey lectures, BTW, are IIRC radio lectures given to a popular audience.)
The class also included a student presentation on the text and a discussion with Lewontin himself. I got the impression that he (and perhaps my instructors, though it was impossible to be sure) tries to "play both sides against the middle" in the "science war". He criticized the sociologists etc. of science who (like I would say) seem to know very little science, social or (worse) otherwise as well as the Norman Levitts, Alan Sokals and so on of the world for not understanding the social context of science. (This is unfair, as Alon has pointed out. It is also not true that philosophers needed the prodding of the pomos to take the social context of science seriously. They are of course inconsistent on the point since they often regard Bacon as the father of modern science - ridiculous, really, except for his social contribution, whence the inconsistency. Other philosophers of science since then have also stressed the social "matrix" of science.)
It is important to realize that Lewontin's remarks of the sort Alon has extracted are exactly the same sort of thing that B. Latour, H. Collins, and other postmodern sociologists (etc.) of science mention. Sure, they say more mild and reasonable (or platitudinous) things elsewhere, and in the case of Lewontin, I agree, he certainly knows more genetics than me or anyone else I've met. But that doesn't make him immune to misunderstanding science as a process or activity. I argued in my final paper for the class that virtually every single work we studied made the same sort of error: assuming that their discipline (rhetoric, sociology, even my own philosophy, history, etc.) could conclude, on its own, how science works. Lewontin here counts as a sociologist of science in <i>B as I, because that's in essence what he is doing. (Were this an academic paper I would defend that claim.) Nothing wrong with sociology of science, BTW: Stephen Cole (for example) seems to recognize his discipline's limitations.
As for reductionism, well, there is a lot of confusion and lack of mutual understanding on this topic. Philosophers tend to use the one way, scientists others. What it seems most scientists mean when they say they they are reductionists and defend reductionism is actually monism, the thesis that there is one sort of stuff. I would argue that science is now monistic - in particular it tacitly adopts (for reasons I leave to the literature) a materialist monism.
Reductionism in the other, more philosophical sense, though it appears that biologists use it this way too (Hi, PZ) involves a denial of emergent properties. Nobody is a reductionist in this sense. The claim is more interesting when it comes to how one should handle emergence. Contemporary emergentist philosophers (e.g. Mario Bunge) do not assert that emergent properties are unpredictable: instead explaining their emergence from the underlying components and the environment and structure is an interesting task of science. (Consider a molecule: molecules have pretty much well defined shapes, albeit ones in flux. How do they get these from the more shapeless atoms that compose them? Ditto for the atoms and the still more shapeless elementary particles.) The question is then an epistemic one: scientists or philosophers accused of being greedy reductionists are actually, it seems to me, being accused of, to put it simply, oversimplification: not recognizing that certain properties are emergent (asserting that they are resultant properties (e.g. mass of a molecule vis-a-vis its atoms, for example), or that their explanation fails to account for some things.
Notice that in the latter case the "greedies" are accused of ignoring social factors. This is sometimes true, but it is interesting that one has to explain the origin of social factors too - there's a feedback cycle there, which (as everyone on all sides realizes) makes for a very difficult problem.
(phew!)#: Posted by on 07/03 at 08:08 AM -
Variability in the IQ studies by socioeconomic status would seem to me to support the importance of environmental factors. Or don't you think class effects the environment of children?
The chapters titled "Causes and effects" and "Dreams of the human genome" go into great detail on the ideological underpinnings of the HGP. Here, for instance:Why, then, do so many powerful, famous, successful, and extremely intelligent scientists want to sequence the human genome? The answer is, in part, that they are so completely devoted to the ideology of simple unitary causes that they believe in the efficacy of the research and do not ask themselves more complicated questions.
He doesn't criticize basic research. He critices the premises on which it was justified.
The HGP has no medical applications yet. I'm glad it was done, because it is a wonderful tool...but let's not delude ourselves. That's what Lewontin is saying -- many have presented the HGP as a great resource for solving human ills, when what it really is is a way to see into the genetic history of life on earth. -
Kristjan wrote:
I don't believe we have a selection bias towards negative examples, otherwise how would you explain all the annecdotal evidence given? I can't really say what we have instead, but it's something else.
Well, mine was strictly argumentum ex rectum, as evo-psych arguments are, but I find Gerd Gigerenzer's assertion that erring on the side of aversion to the even potentially negative increases survival value by diminishing risk a plausible construct. I freely admit that it's just an idea, not that I have any evidence for it at this point. -
Variability in the IQ studies by socioeconomic status would seem to me to support the importance of environmental factors. Or don't you think class effects the environment of children?
Of course it supports the importance of environmental factors. But Turkheimer's study supports a particular combination of environment and genetics that Lewontin ridicules.
He doesn't criticize basic research. He critices the premises on which it was justified.
He criticizes basic research in other parts of the book. In particular, he talks about how medicine is "empirical" rather than scientific. On pages 42-44, he tries to show how the bulk of the decrease in mortality over tha last 200 years is due to social rather than scientific causes, but to do that he falsifies reality (Koch didn't invent germ theory, and he underestimates the increase in life expectancy at 60 by a factor of 14).
Why, then, do so many powerful, famous, successful, and extremely intelligent scientists want to sequence the human genome? The answer is, in part, that they are so completely devoted to the ideology of simple unitary causes that they believe in the efficacy of the research and do not ask themselves more complicated questions.
This isn't ideology. Lewontin tries to connect unitary causes to political ideology, but he fails. In fact unitary causes are an attempt to simplify nature that veers into the territory of oversimplification. There are so many external factors that can make scientists abandon empiricism apart from ideology - money, ego, optimism about a project, and the feel-good factor (it's easier to sequence genes than to study environmental influences, hence everything there is to know about humans is in the human genome) come to mind. - By the way, Raven, Chris, I've been meaning to thank you for your kind words about my article since you posted them, but I kept forgetting. So thank your Chris and thank you Raven.
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I am not in any way qualified to participate in this discussion, but I find it facinating (except for the few personal attacks). It's worth noticing that even when people disagree about something, it can happen in a way that provides knowledge for the people observing the debate.
#: Posted by on 07/03 at 09:38 AM
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Lewontin is as qualified to talk about legitimization as Larry Summers is to talk about gender differences in cognition or Noam Chomsky is to talk about foreign policy.
This is the amusing thing about this entire thread, Alon. You attack Lewontin for claiming that science is political, and the whole of your argument is shot through with an alarmingly clumsy and ill-informed political resentment. Though I appreciate your attempt at even-handedness by including Summers above, can you really honestly believe you can say that Chomsky is not "qualified to talk about foreign policy" - regardless of whether you agree with what he says, which is a different matter entirely - without knowing that you come across as a buffoon?
Actually, Lewontin does claim that this is the primary purpose of science. I'm basing this observation on the following quotes:
1. "What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth-century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy" (p. 10).
2. "Science... is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch" (p. 9).
3. "So, the ideology of modern science, including modern biology, makes the atom or individual the causal source of all the properties of larger collections" (p. 13).
4. "This [biological determinism] is the view that the old society was chatacerized by artifical barriers to equality, whereas the new society allows a natural sorting process to decide who is to get the status, wealth, and power and who is not" (p. 20).
Every single one of these quotes is false; the first three are also marks of an anti-scientific crackpot.
You have been provided with abundant evidence to the contrary in this very thread. You have provided no evidence to back up your assertions other than repeating them with increasing fervor. In arguing against the evidence you've been provided, you cherry-pick what you respond to and ignore the empirical data (as you did when you responded to my comment about Malthus by again downplaying Malthus' influence on Darwin's thought, eliding the passage in which Darwin himself gives Malthus credit for the germ of the natural selection idea.
If there is an anti-scientific crackpot in this thread, it is not Lewontin.
Those "false," "crackpot" statements you deride are accepted as truth to some degree by the vast majority of scientists of my acquaintance. The first one is, despite your grossly incompetent misreading of it, literally true by Darwin's admission, and you have been provided that admission as evidence in this thread, though you chose to ignore it. The second is so widely accepted among scientists as to be considered trite, a caution along the lines of "remember to clean your glassware" or "beware Type II errors," except with far less practical application in day-to-day work. Look for modern writing on the theoretical work of C. Hart Merriam as an example. Vegetative ecologists still fight the notion that plant succession after disturbance is an orderly progression through one transitional state after another to a "climax," a pernicious and widespread idea that reflects the "Progress" bias of western society and not incidentally greatly benefits the clearcutting and grazing industry. That's not anti-scientific crackpottery: the scientists are largely on my side in that one. Statement three can be suppported trivially by looking through newspapers for discussion of the "Gay Gene".
I could go on.#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/03 at 09:57 AM -
By the way, Raven, Chris, I've been meaning to thank you for your kind words about my article since you posted them, but I kept forgetting. So thank your Chris and thank you Raven.
I hold to that compliment, Alon, despite my subsequent criticism of your points. You're an engaging writer.#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/03 at 09:59 AM -
many have presented the HGP as a great resource for solving human ills
I thought that was done deliberately (and cynically) in order to obtain funding from the ill-educated relatively anti-science politicians and public; whereas the researchers themselves were in it more for the pure information (though not in the least discounting the hope of getting some useful medical applications!).#: Posted by on 07/03 at 10:08 AM -
Alon wrote:
n extensive study done by Eric Turkheimer and published in Psychological Science in November 2003 shows that in middle- and upper-class families, IQ has very high heritability, whereas in lower-class families environmental factors predominate and genes contribute almost nothing to variation in intelligence. The explanation for that is that everyone has a certain potential for intelligence that is mostly genetic, but low socioeconomic status can prevent people from realizing their full potentials. Lewontin calls this the empty bucket or innate capacity metaphor and derides it, "But there is no more biology in the innate capacity metaphor than there is in the notion of fixed genetic effects." But now we know that the innate capacity metaphor is exactly right..
and
When I say “heritability,” I’m essentially quoting previous studies about the heritability of IQ. I presume that Eric Turkhemier used heritability in the precise genetic sense when he concluded that the heritability of IQ was 0.1 for families of low socioeconomic status and 0.72 for families of middle and high SES.
Trying to understand this. Please indicate right or wrong.
First, I assume Heritability of some measured property (say IQ) in a population is defined as (variance of property due to genetic reasons)/(total variance of property).
Thus, suppose I measure the IQs of a large number of people in an age-group in families of high SES. Suppose I get a nice Bell curve, with average 100 and standard deviation of 12, variance of 144. Then, the heritability of IQ in families in high SES is 0.72 means that if I restrict myself to a large genetically identical subset of this population (not really possible in humans, but perhaps possible in those funny fire-ants PZMyers wrote about), then 0.72 of the variation would vanish. i.e, measurement on this subset would yield a Bell curve with some average and a variance of (1-0.72) * 144 = 40.3, or a standard deviation of 6.3. Similarly, if the curve I first described was instead the IQ distribution of families of low SES, then the subset would yield a Bell curve with some average, and a variance of (1 - 0.1) * 144 = 129.6 or standard deviation of 11.4.
The above is what I take to be the meaning of Turkheimer's findings. Notice, we can't say anything about the average of our subpopulation, it could be different from 100; heritability doesn't say anything about it.
What is the meaning of "full potential"? Does "full potential" mean more than three standard deviations above the average? (i.e., 99th percentile or better?) Or is "full potential" represented by the average? Is the innate capacity metaphor the claim that two genetically identical populations, one put into low SES and other put into high SES will have the same 99th percentile IQ score? The same average IQ score? The same 6-sigma score ( 1 in a billion)? How does Turkheimer's findings shed any light on the innate capacity metaphor?
Do you notice something, by the way - a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 11.4, means about 2.5% of that population has a score above 123. A mean of hundred and a standard deviation of 6.3 has many less IQ-smart people, only 2.5% of the population has a score above 113.
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Thus, for instance, if population of clones, when put in low SES environment, has a standard deviation of IQ of 11.4 and when put in a high SES environment, has a standard deviation of 6.3, and by "innate capacity" or "full potential" we mean the value exceeded by only 2.5% of the sample (2 sigma), then if our clones have a "full potential" of 125, we're predicting that in low SES the clones will have mean of 125 - 2*11.4 or around 102, and in high SES, the clones will have a mean of 125 - 2 * 6.3 or around 112. Is there evidence for this type of finding anywhere, in Turkheimer or elsewhere?
(Maybe there is a better way to look at this, but the only way I know how to evaluate a general claim is to get specific.) -
This is the amusing thing about this entire thread, Alon. You attack Lewontin for claiming that science is political, and the whole of your argument is shot through with an alarmingly clumsy and ill-informed political resentment. Though I appreciate your attempt at even-handedness by including Summers above, can you really honestly believe you can say that Chomsky is not "qualified to talk about foreign policy" - regardless of whether you agree with what he says, which is a different matter entirely - without knowing that you come across as a buffoon?
Why do I come across as a buffoon? I'm not claiming that I'm more qualified than Lewontin to write about politics or that I'm as qualified as Lewontin to write about biology. You talk about evidence a lot, so where is your evidence that Biology as Ideology is about biology rather than about sociology and politics of science?
You have provided no evidence to back up your assertions other than repeating them with increasing fervor.
Which assertions? If you're talking about the one that Lewontin thinks science's primary purpose is to legitimize the social structure, I'm providing quotes from the book in order to prove that. If you're talking about the one that Darwinism stood on its own merits, you're partly right. I haven't provided evidence that Darwinism stood on its own merits, but I have provided evidence that it didn't stand on Malthus's, namely reference to the prevailing view of the world at the time.
In arguing against the evidence you've been provided, you cherry-pick what you respond to and ignore the empirical data (as you did when you responded to my comment about Malthus by again downplaying Malthus' influence on Darwin's thought, eliding the passage in which Darwin himself gives Malthus credit for the germ of the natural selection idea.
I didn't include it in my quote, Chris, for the reason that my primary argument here is not about what convinced Darwin that natural selection was correct but about what convinced the other biologists that natural selection was correct.
Those "false," "crackpot" statements you deride are accepted as truth to some degree by the vast majority of scientists of my acquaintance. The first one is, despite your grossly incompetent misreading of it, literally true by Darwin's admission, and you have been provided that admission as evidence in this thread, though you chose to ignore it.
According to your quote, Darwin claims he read Malthus in 10/1838. But that was when he already had massive evidence for natural selection; the sources I can find aren't clear on whether he developed the theory of natural selection before or after 10/1838 - from what I've read I'm fairly sure he did in 1838, but I have no idea in what month.
The second is so widely accepted among scientists as to be considered trite, a caution along the lines of "remember to clean your glassware" or "beware Type II errors," except with far less practical application in day-to-day work. Look for modern writing on the theoretical work of C. Hart Merriam as an example. Vegetative ecologists still fight the notion that plant succession after disturbance is an orderly progression through one transitional state after another to a "climax," a pernicious and widespread idea that reflects the "Progress" bias of western society and not incidentally greatly benefits the clearcutting and grazing industry.
What kind of caution is that? If it's as trivial as not making type II errors, then why do people think it's somehow in the nature of science to legitimize social structure when no one thinks it's in its nature to make type II errors? As for vegetative ecologists, you'll have to give me some link to explain the situation to me, because from what I know people generally consider human tampering with the environment always bad.
Statement three can be suppported trivially by looking through newspapers for discussion of the "Gay Gene".
Why does it support Lewontin's third statement? Frontline's feature on that says that a scientist found, or thought he found, a genetic basis for male homosexuality. - One last - to me (physics, engineering background) there is a vague distinction between a technology project and a science project. To me, the Human Genome Project was more about technology than science, like the lunar Apollo program. Another large technology program was the Manhattan project for the A-bomb. I think, if one accepts the vague distinction, that technology programs are much more tied to prevailing ideology in society, etc., than science programs.
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Which part of "in this article I will mostly refrain from attacking Lewontin's biology" did you fail to understand? The book is predominantly about social science - how science is done and how it relates to social structures, to be precise - with biology only providing the backdrop. Lewontin is as qualified to talk about legitimization as Larry Summers is to talk about gender differences in cognition or Noam Chomsky is to talk about foreign policy.
Well, you clearly haven't understood what I wrote, then.
(Which puts me in the same category as Richard Lewontin, yay!).
I'll repeat: in the face of massive criticism of your extreme misreading of the book, you don't at any point introspectively consider you may in fact be wrong, but instead, as coturnix writes:
You have provided no evidence to back up your assertions other than repeating them with increasing fervor.
I'd better explain then. Here were go.
'Saying that modern science is reductionistic because of ideology is plain wrong' is not his argument. If it were his argument, the book would be called Ideology as Biology. What he is arguing is that biology has in many cases, and has continued to do so even with very recent scientific projects, produced ongoing ideologically influenced reductionist perspectives YET! whilst these perspectives are drawn from biology and permeate it ideologically as a *social institution*, as a scientist, it is not necessary to agree with them:
"Look!" He says, "I'm a leading scientist and I don't. I think they get in the way of doing good science!"
What's your response?
"Insane... antiscience crackpot"
Hmmmm.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 11:14 AM - If these are all technology projects, then can you give any examples of science projects?
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I have not read Lewontin's book, but I've read most of the essays that he has published in the NYRoB over the last 15 years or so. I don't agree with many of his conclusions about how biology as a science operates, either. But to call Lewontin "anti-science" is ridiculous, and could be done only by someone ignorant of (or choosing to ignore) his substantial contributions.
Something that I think is being missed here is the intellectual environment within which Lewontin cut his teeth: Harvard in the 1960s-1980s, where a narrow version of the reductionist paradigm in biology was being pursued extremely aggressively, and what we might today call "integrative biology" was in many cases being pushed to the periphery by J. Watson and his colleagues. These pressures caused, for example, E.O. Wilson to leave the Biology Department for the Agassiz Museum (see Wilson's memoir for a long discussion). Lewontin arguably was more responsible than anyone else for the fusion of molecular biology with quantitative genetics and evolutionary biology. One need only read how Watson's text Molecular Biology of the Gene is structured as a series of declarative statements about how genes operate to see that a biologist predominantly interested in genetic diversity could take offense at some of the assumptions underlying its program (disclosure: my Chair was a coauthor of that excellent book).
What we are dealing with is one of the oldest schisms in biology: lumpers versus splitters. Those who want to study commonalities (e.g., universality of molecular mechanism; "the" human genome) versus those who want to explain diversity (e.g. population genetic structure). If one does not understand these debates or this history (and Alon appears not to), I think that Lewontin's essays are easily misconstrued.
Now, all that said, I think that in large measure Lewontin is still fighting the battles of ten and twenty and thirty years ago, and for reasons rather different than those highlighted by Levy, I think that Lewontin is choosing to miss the fact that at least some of the tensions within biology that most concern him are dissipating, as quantitative genetics and biological diversity once again become central concerns of big-G (no pun intended) Genetics.
In addition, my readings of his essays lead me to suspect that Lewontin, who has spent his entire career at Harvard, sees the whole of biology through the lens of his experience at that particular institution. And in many ways, that experience is probably not representative. Lewontin's views may be profoundly influenced by his professional and history within that particular elite institution. The irony is that these are the sorts of influences on scientific practice that many of Lewontin's essays focus upon. - Alex, you are correct and I have heard Lewontin himself stating that, of course, he as a scientist is colored by his own social environment and biases.
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As for reductionism, well, there is a lot of confusion and lack of mutual understanding on this topic. Philosophers tend to use the one way, scientists others.
I think you're on to something here, Keith. I would just add that laypeople may use it in a combination of ways, or mean something else entirely. In my classes on systematic evaluation of massage research, very few of the students are philosophers or scientists or for that matter "loons" (by which I mean people who've made up their mind against science and won't receive input to the contrary. Actually, I prefer the term "woo-woo" as it doesn't slander perfectly good birds, but when in Pharyngula...).
Mainly, they have not been exposed to science very much, but will listen to what I have to say with an open mind. They do have a sense of respect for the complexity of what it means to be human, and they are a little suspicious of what they have heard to be the "reductionism" of science, concerned that it may seek to deny that complexity, but beyond that, the idea of reductionism is often not more fully formed. So confronting it head on and listening to their concerns helps to defuse those concerns.
Reductionism in the other, more philosophical sense, though it appears that biologists use it this way too (Hi, PZ) involves a denial of emergent properties. Nobody is a reductionist in this sense.
I think (and again, I am talking strictly out of my ass, because this is purely anecdotal evidence based on my observations) that there is a difference on this point between clinicians and scientists, and among scientists, between the physical and mathematical scientists and the biological scientists, and that it has to do with the ability to build models of their discipline.
Models are necessary to science--even PZ doesn't study every zebrafish in the world, but rather uses some zebrafish as models for the rest. Similarly, people look at cancer in rats and other animals as a model for disease in humans. The important question then becomes how well does the model map to what it purports to represent (which is why that ghastly article that gave PZ brainlock in the other thread fails--he never demonstrates why his software model should be taken as a good map to DNA, by the way).
Until recently, good mathematical tools for modeling biology haven't existed (with a few notable exceptions: partial differential equations can model a few small things, like blood flow--but no overall large phenomena have lent themselves to a purely quantitative desciption). So models in biology have been very subjective as a result in comparison to physical science models. On the other hand, in physics, mathematical models have existed for a very long time, and physicists have already grappled with issues that biologists are just now having to confront in mathematics, such as tractability (ability to compute using reasonable amount of time and computing power) vs. expressivity (richness of description). The fact that biological models were more relatively subjective previously also allowed more expressivity without compromising tractability at the time. Now, trying to fit the newer mathematical and computational tools to biology, without losing the previous expressivity to too great a degree, brings these issues to the fore.
Which leads to another point Keith made:
The question is then an epistemic one: scientists or philosophers accused of being greedy reductionists are actually, it seems to me, being accused of, to put it simply, oversimplification: not recognizing that certain properties are emergent (asserting that they are resultant properties (e.g. mass of a molecule vis-a-vis its atoms, for example), or that their explanation fails to account for some things.
Which is what my students fear, but not at a level they can be hyperverbal about--they are concerned that scientific reductionism (increased tractability) will make them somehow less wonderful and miraculous as humans (decreased expressivity). When these meta-factual concerns are addressed (à la Lewontin), they are then in a position to receive and process the facts (à la Sagan). If I did the Sagan "just the facts, ma'am" approach only, I don't think it would be received in that audience of non-scientists. -
Tigerbear, you haven't read my article, have you? Because either you don't know that I refuted his claims about legitimization, or you have read them and don't care. You keep saying his being a scientist necessarily makes him pro-science; will you also chide someone who thinks Foucault and Derrida practice extreme anti-intellectualism because Foucault and Derrida are intellectuals?
Alex, I'm fairly certain one can attack the reductionist paradigm of biology without involving the rest of science in the battle or talking about how science legitimizes social structures. - What the innate capacity metaphor says is that there is a highly heritable potential distributed with average greater than 100 (say 110, to pull a number out of thin air), which the environment can then modify. According to Turkheimer, the environment can only modify the potential IQ downward, and does so only in low-SES people.
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From my perspective, the Human Genome Project involved mass-production-izing well-understood laboratory techniques already in use. If the HGP had not happened, the human genome would eventually have been sequenced, but over many, many more years, perhaps (finally) in a series of senior undergrad projects.
The attempt to detect gravity waves of general relativity (LIGO) while indeed technologically intensive ( attempt to extend laser interferometry to extreme levels of precision) is more science than technology, because the aim is to detect a postulated but never directly detected entity. There is no substitute to the LIGO experiment.
The Apollo project and the Manhattan project, likewise, didn't require a whole lot of new scientific principles - nothing qualitatively new - they were primarily engineering problems.
I admit, the distinction is imprecise.
Anyway, waiting to hear more about heritability. -
If these are all technology projects, then can you give any examples of science projects?
These days, it's getting harder and harder to get funding to do a pure science project--in fact, when I had an internship a few years ago to develop a cancer application of my mouse anatomy ontology research (i.e., technology), I was told in so many words that the client wasn't interested in a "science project" (i.e., knowledge without immediate direct application).
But I got back at them--I delivered the technology as promised AND in the process did science without telling them.
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From Loren Petrich's comment:
Lewontin sneers,
Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them?
I invite him to go to a beach and make some sand castles and teach himself a lesson in emergent properties -- collectives of sand grains have some properties very different from those of individual sand grains.
Toward the end, he seems to be making a plea for scientists to incorporate gods and demons and so forth into their hypotheses; he ought to address the question of how those hypotheses would be tested.
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While I have not read Lewontin's book either (it is now on my list), I must say that Lewontin most likely is not "sneering". Rather, he is showing the attitude, often unspoken, of the general public toward science. I have observed the phenomenon myself when talking to people at my church (they are fundies, I am not) and debating my friends at work. Americans are in general ignorant of the advances made in science since 1850. They accept that a TV works, but have no idea HOW (Quantum? Wasn't that a TV show?). They know that reporduction works, but are largely ignorant of meiosis (RNA? Oh, yeah! My friend is a nurse, too. She is RNB...), etc.
I recall that Stephen Jay Gould also covered the topic of social bias and ideology in The Panda's Thumb. I believe that the ideological and dogmatic views in Fundamentalism drive not only their "fact filters" but also their agenda.
We need to address the fact that education does seem somewhat lacking in terms of required classes at the elementary and high-school levels. There is also the matter of attitude toward education expressed by students and their parents. The Jerry Springer Show provides some interesting anecdotal evidence for that.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 12:06 PM -
Arun, if you're interested, Turkheimer's paper is available online:
<a href="http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer psychological science.pdf">http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer psychological science.pdf</a> - #30681 - I don't see any evidence for the innate capacity metaphor in anything discussed so far. You have to show not just heritability, but also that the average goes down by a sufficient number of standard deviations, like in #30666; you also have to show that high SES people have an asymmetric distribution, as more and more of them approach the "full potential".
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Tigerbear, you haven't read my article, have you? Because either you don't know that I refuted his claims about legitimization, or you have read them and don't care. You keep saying his being a scientist necessarily makes him pro-science; will you also chide someone who thinks Foucault and Derrida practice extreme anti-intellectualism because Foucault and Derrida are intellectuals?
I read it. You didn't refute it. You may believe you did, but that's your own problem, quite frankly. Your critique of 19th century post-Darwinian theory is poor, Whiggish, even. Your interpretation of political theory in the service of the non-legimitisation argument is hilariously superficial.
I won't rise to the post-modernist bashing. Apart from you seem to enjoy denouncing academics in witch-hunt terms, so perhaps you enjoyed the Sokal hoax. I'm not sure you'd have understood much about it, though.
'Even before I read it, I expected to find it full of cheap shots at science'.
One sentence.
Says it all.#: Posted by on 07/03 at 12:38 PM -
I really don't see how you refuted his legitimization argument. You acknowledge that it has occurred in the case of eugenics, so how can you argue it is not occurring now in the case of genetic reductionism? It's practically inescapable--we're always hearing about the discovery of a gene for schizophrenia, a gene for homosexuality, a gene for this and that. We still have public policy debates that center around whether a behavior is 'innate', or declare that a zygote is human because it has the full genetic complement.
You know I'm gung-ho about science...but that doesn't mean I close my eyes and pretend science isn't used as a legitimator of contemporary ideology. -
According to your quote, Darwin claims he read Malthus in 10/1838. But that was when he already had massive evidence for natural selection; the sources I can find aren't clear on whether he developed the theory of natural selection before or after 10/1838 - from what I've read I'm fairly sure he did in 1838, but I have no idea in what month.
The primary source, namely Charles Darwin, says that he developed the theory after considering the ideas in Malthus' writings. Which has been told you repeatedly.
And of course he had collected massive evidence for natural selection. No one disputes that. He was working out how to explain the phenomena expressed in the data when he built upon Malthus' insight into population dynamics.
If it's as trivial as not making type II errors, then why do people think it's somehow in the nature of science to legitimize social structure when no one thinks it's in its nature to make type II errors?
No one thinks it's in "science's nature" to make Type II errors?
Forget this. I'm gonna go talk about trigonometry with my dog. That'll be less frustrating than this dialogue, with a marginally greater possibility of subsequent increased understanding on the part of my correspondent.#: Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/03 at 01:02 PM -
You acknowledge that it has occurred in the case of eugenics, so how can you argue it is not occurring now in the case of genetic reductionism?
For one, the direction of causation is opposite. Eugenics wasn't the cause of widespread racism in the West; it was developed in the wake of such racism. Anthropology didn't cause Europeans to believe their cultures were superior to non-Europeans'; it developed as Europeans tried to justify these beliefs. Genetic determinism, however, caused rather than was caused by the recent hysteria in the media and political discourse for genes and innateness.
The primary source, namely Charles Darwin, says that he developed the theory after considering the ideas in Malthus' writings. Which has been told you repeatedly.
And of course he had collected massive evidence for natural selection. No one disputes that. He was working out how to explain the phenomena expressed in the data when he built upon Malthus' insight into population dynamics.
So saying he took ideas from political economy and expanded them to natural economy only reveals part of the picture, the other part being that he applied these ideas to massive amounts of evidence.
No one thinks it's in "science's nature" to make Type II errors?
Please tell me that if someone tells you that one of science's roles, along with observation and explanation, is to make type II errors, you won't laugh. -
Please tell me that if someone tells you that one of science's roles, along with observation and explanation, is to make type II errors, you won't laugh.
Apparently Alon has difficulty distinguishing how science should be done from how it often is done. [/snark] -
For one, the direction of causation is opposite. Eugenics wasn't the cause of widespread racism in the West; it was developed in the wake of such racism. Anthropology didn't cause Europeans to believe their cultures were superior to non-Europeans'; it developed as Europeans tried to justify these beliefs. Genetic determinism, however, caused rather than was caused by the recent hysteria in the media and political discourse for genes and innateness.
What is the direction of causation in a positive feedback loop, Alon? The assumption that causation is linear and unidirectional is too simplistic a model for either biology or sociology.
An example from biology: Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) stimulates the production of luteinizing hormone (LH). LH stimulates the production of estrogen. Estrogen stimulates GnRH, which stimulates more LH, which stimulates more estrogen....This keeps going more and more strongly until something else intervenes to break the cycle.