Quotes from Richard C. Lewontin

The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Narrowness and pragmatism are characteristic of the dominant ways of thought under capitalism, where the individualism of economic man is a model for the autonomy and isolation of all phenomena, and where a knowledge industry turns scientific ideas into marketable commodities—precisely the magic bullets that the pharmaceutical industry sells people.

For Darwinian biology the organism is the nexus of the internal and external forces. It is only through natural selection of internally produced variations, which happen to match by chance the externally generated environmental demands, that what is outside and what is inside confront each other.

Biology Under the Influence is a collection of our essays built around the general theme of the dual nature of science. On the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry.

On the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry.