BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY
By R.C. Lewontin
HarperPerenniel, 1991
Category: Adult Non-fiction
I read so many interesting things over the holidays …
This one was not exactly light holiday reading, but well worth the effort. My copy is on loan from a friend, but I have decided I’d like my own so that I can re-read and mull some more. (Yes, I officially started my 2008 Christmas Wish list on January 3!)
BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY got me thinking about assumptions—personal as well as cultural—and how these assumptions impact my understanding of the world I live in. Lewontin spends several chapters exploring the idea that modern biological science is marred by a particular assumption, an ideological bias: that everything we humans are is encoded by our DNA. Lewontin attacks this notion on several levels, most surprisingly, to me, by suggesting the Human Genome Project (since completed but at the time this book was written still in its infancy) is an exercise in futility.
I was especially struck by the final chapter, Science as Social Action, in which the author reminds readers that environments do not exist in isolation but, rather, are created by relationship with organisms. “The physical and biological worlds since the beginning of the earth have been in a constant state of flux and change” and so, Lewontin contends, “any rational environmental movement must abandon the romantic and totally unfounded ideological commitment to a harmonious and balanced world in which the environment is preserved and turn its attention to the real question, which is, how do people want to live and how are they to arrange that they live that way.” As my friend Dan noted, this outlook is far less paralyzing (and guilt-producing) than the one in which we humans are destroying the planet.
Don’t you love books that make you think?