Not in Our Genes

Cover of Not in our Genes.

Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, neurobiologist Steven Rose and psychologist Leon J. Kamin that criticizes many controversial areas of science, particularly sociobiology, biological determinism and the reductionism of the gene-centric view of evolution.

Scholarly reception

Not in Our Genes, makes a strong statement about the entanglement of science and politics: "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology", and makes the following comparison "If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers.^[1] Not in our genes described Dawkins as "the most reductionist of sociobiologists". In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to "an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)", and accused the authors of giving "ideology priority over truth".^[1] Rose replied in the second edition of his book Lifelines. Rose wrote further works in this area; in 2000 he jointly edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, a critique of evolutionary psychology: Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. In 2006 he wrote a paper dismissing heritability estimates as useful scientific measures.^[2]

A review by Richard Dawkins in New Scientist was particularly scathing, accusing the authors of having a "bizarre conspiracy theory of science", accusing them of lies and idiocy, and concluding that it is a "silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious book".^[3]

Richard Webster described Not in Our Genes as "a critique of sociobiology and genetic determinism which is, for the most part, much more subtle and valuable than the Marxism which frequently informs it."^[4]

In his 2002 book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker accused Lewontin et al. of creating a straw man of the discipline of sociobiology and being biased by left-wing politics.^[5]

Publication

• Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature ISBN 0-14-022605-2

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Richard Dawkins, "Sociobiology: the debate continues", a review of Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and R.C.Lewontin (Pantheon Books, 1985), appeared in New Scientist 24 January 1985, web version
2. ^ Rose SP (June 2006). "Commentary: heritability estimates--long past their sell-by date". Int J Epidemiol 35 (3): 525–7. DOI:10.1093/ije/dyl064. PMID 16645027. 
3. ^ Dawkins, C.R. Critical review in New Scientist by Richard Dawkins. New Scientist 24 January 1985
4. ^ Webster, Richard (2005). Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press. p. 611. ISBN 0-9515922-5-4. 
5. ^ Pinker, S. (2002) The Blank Slate, Penguin Books, p. 112.

External links

• Critical review in New Scientist by Richard Dawkins.
• A short favourable review