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Is our nature -- as individuals, as a species
-- determined by our evolution and encoded in our genes?
If we unravel the protein sequences of our DNA, will we
gain the power to cure all of our physiological and psychological
afflictions and even to solve the problems of our society?
Today biologists -- especially geneticists -- are proposing
answers to questions that have long been asked by philosophy
or faith or the social sciences. Their work carries the
weight of scientific authority and attracts widespread public
attention, but it is often based on what the renowned evolutionary
biologist Richard Lewontin identifies as a highly reductive
misconception: "the pervasive error that confuses the
genetic state of an organism with its total physical and
psychic nature as a human being."
In these nine essays covering the history
of modern biology from Darwin to Dolly the sheep, all of
which were originally published in The New York Review
of Books, Lewontin combines sharp criticisms of overreaching
scientific claims with lucid expositions of the exact state
of current scientific knowledge -- not only what we do know,
but what we don't and maybe won't anytime soon. Among the
subjects he discusses are heredity and natural selection,
evolutionary psychology and altruism, nineteeth-century
naturalist novels, sex surveys, cloning, and the Human Genome
Project. In each case he casts an ever-vigilant and deflationary
eye on the temptation to look to biology for explanations
of everything we want to know about our physical, mental,
and social lives.
These essays -- several of them updated
with epilogues that take account of scientific developments
since they were first written -- are an indispensable guide
to the most controversial issues in the life sciences today.
Richard Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz
Research Professor at Harvard University. He is the author
of Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and The
Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and the coauthor
of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins)
and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin).
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