It Ain't Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions - Hardcover

Lewontin, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940322102 ISBN 13: 9780940322103

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2000

Synopsis

Biology makes the headlines practically every few weeks as geneticists claim they have accounted for yet another human trait or ailment. However out of complex research have come exaggerations and misunderstandings about what biology, especially genetics can tell us. In this collection of essays from The New York Review of Books, Lewontin demystifies some of the most controversial issues in the life sciences today. On topics ranging from Darwin to Dolly the sheep, including genetic determinism, heredity and natural selection, evolutionary psychology and altruism, sex surveys, cloning and the Human Genome project, he offers both sharp criticisms of the "overweening pride" of scientists and lucid expositions of the exact state of scientific knowledge. In each case he casts an ever-vigilant and deflationary eye on the temptation to overstate the power of biology to explain everything we want to know about ourselves.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Lewontin is a leading geneticist and the author of Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin). He is Professor of Population Sciences and the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University.

Reviews

This wide-ranging collection of provocative essay-reviews from The New York Review of Books focuses on the biological sciences. Lewontin (Agassiz Prof. of Biology/Harvard) finds himself at odds with some fashionable orthodoxies of modern biology. In particular, he is skeptical of the determinist streak evident in many proponents of genetics. In a brief introduction he sets the context. As he sees it, part of the problem originates with the migration into biology of physicists and chemists in the 1950s, thrusting molecular biology into the center of public attention. Congress may be unwilling to fund the supercollider, but it did not blanch at funding the Human Genome Project, touted as the cure-all for myriad ills. Lewontin points out that, despite the geneticists' hype, in many cases the genetic expression of a congenital disease is not confined to a unique sequence of DNA. Moreover, identifying the genetic cause does not necessarily produce a cure. Lewontin's historical observations are also useful. For instance, while Darwin's formulation of natural selection as the driving force of evolution is not open to serious challenge, the pat notion of species often conveniently overlooks the considerable degree of variation within a species. As one would expect from an NYRB reviewer, Lewontin rarely dodges controversyconcerning the National Bioethics Advisory Commission's report on cloning, he wonders whether it was at all wise to give religious spokespeople input into a document on scientific policy. Likewise, he points out the key problem in research on human sexuality: whether the subjects can be trusted to tell the researchers the truth about their practices. The book's exploration of these and other issues is given additional depth by the inclusion of exchanges between Lewontin and some of the subjects of the reviews. Well-written, insightful, and a useful reminder of the complex issues still unsolved in the biological sciences. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Harvard biologist Lewontin is highly skeptical of the human genome project supporters' claims that complete knowledge of the human organism and effective gene therapies are just around the corner. His forceful critique of this multimillion-dollar gene-mapping project points out that our DNA is infinitely complex, and that mutations in genes are not the cause of, say, cancer, although they may be one of many predisposing conditions. In a bracing, lucid collection of essays, all originally published in the New York Review of Books, Lewontin makes bold forays into such fields as evolutionary theory, IQ testing, criminology, artificial intelligence, neurobiology and gender differences, exposing sloppy thinking and fallacies on all fronts. Scrutinizing "the development of modern biology from Darwin to Dolly" (a reference to the sheep cloned in 1997), Lewontin lambastes Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission, charging that its report on the possibility of human cloning sidestepped fundamental ethical, religious and political issues. Lewontin is a formidable critic of simplistic, flawed biological determinism, which he sees at work in studies of identical twins reared apart; in feminist biologists' claim that females are the smarter, gentler, more humane sex; in sociobiologist E.O. Wilson's belief that the sexual division of power flows directly from innate differences between men and women; and in biologist Richard Dawkins's argument for the primacy of genes over the social environment. Several of these rigorous essays include an exchange of letters between Lewontin and his critics, making this an illuminating forum of ideas. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0940322102
• ISBN 13: 9780940322103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330