Reflections from Richard Lewontin’s Biology As Ideology
Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.
Among the many themes addressed in Richard Lewontin's very fine Biology As Ideology, some that struck us as especially deserving of reflection are the deeper presuppositions of the narrative of the sciences, biology in particular; and the manner in which those presuppositions result in a story amenable to the service of certain ideological commitments.
To begin with the first, underlying the biological determinism which seeks its justification in the terms of the New-Darwinian synthesis is a particular conception of the world as being, in essence, but the sum of so many parts. It is a conception which grows out naturally enough from the methodology so decisively accounted by René Descartes in his seminal Discourse On Method.
The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted. (from Part II)
And, indeed, within the framework of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis the ontological implications of the Cartesian method have translated into resultant misunderstandings of organisms and their relationships to both their internal constitution and their external environment.
Within respect to the relationship of the organism to its internal constitution, the atomistic heuristic has led to a ‘scientific image’ of beings has but complex physical systems.This found expression with Descartes himself, who configured animals as but especially complicated automata. Contemporarily, that reductionist rubric has found a specious refuge in the language of genetic determinism (genetics being one pole of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis). Among the reasons that is is a specious refuge is a mischaracterization of the function of genes themselves within the life of the organism. It is a function which is subordinate to a broader metabolism whose thematic unity defies specification as originating in any single aspect or element of its complexity. Thus, in the essay Causes and Their Effects Lewontin relays,
It is usually said that genes make proteins and that genes are self-replicating. But genes make nothing. A protein is made by a complex system of chemical production involving other proteins, using the particular sequence of nucleotides in a gene to determine the exact formula for the protein being manufactured. Sometimes the gene is said to the “blueprint” for a protein or the source of “information” for determining a protein. As such, it is seen as more important than the mere manufacturing machinery. Yet proteins cannot be manufactured without both the gene and the rest of the machinery. Neither is more important…
Nor are genes self-replicating. They cannot make themselves any more than they can make a protein. Genes are made by a complex machinery of proteins that uses the genes as models for more genes. When we refer to genes as self-replicating, we endow them with a mysterious, autonomous power that seems to place them above the more ordinary materials of the body. Yet if anything in the world can be said to be self-replicating, it is not the gene, but the entire organism as a complex system. (Lewontin 48)
The consequences of the irreducibility of the organism the to simply its subordinate parts are significant, both for the descriptive aspirations of science more ideally, and also for the question of our own agency. To this latter point we shall recur momentarily.
Yet first, it will be worthwhile to identify the misunderstanding of the relationship of the organism with its environment that derives from like atomizing heuristic. Here, generally vis-a-vis some version of natural selection (the other pole of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis), it is seen as the passive outcome of that environment’s determination. By contrast, the environment, as the environment of an organism, is very largely determined or shaped by the organism. This is the case not merely in how the organism interacts physically with the spaces within which it lives, but with how the environment itself actually is conceived: It is construed precisely as the constitutive spaces within which the organisms act and live. In a substantive way its being is defined by its inhabitants. Hence, Lewontin, in Science and Social Action, conveys,
First, there is no “environment: in some independent and abstract sense. Just as there is no organism without an environment, there is no environment without an organism. Organisms do not experience environments. They create them. They construct their own environments out of the bits and pieces of the physical and biological world and they do so by their own activities…
There is an infinity of ways in which parts of the world can be assembled to make an environment, and we can know what the environment of an organism is only by consulting the organism. Not only do we we consult the organism, but when we describe the environment, we describe it in terms of the organism’s behavior.(Lewontin 109-110)
And we are drawn hence back to the question of agency. The organism does not simply react or respond to its surrounding, It does not merely interact with those surroundings. It is creates that environment. To use a somewhat Kantian phrase, it is the condition of the environment’s very possibility.
Here we are recalled of perhaps the most important lesson of Biology As Ideology. Namely, that all too often the language of biology, rather than reflecting a particular description or explanation of the ‘mere facts’ (and indeed the question of what a ‘mere fact’ is deserves its own consideration, a bit beyond the scope of this present reflection), serves to further ideological commitments of a decidedly problematic nature. In particular reductionism lends itself to use in this regard. For the reductionist account of the universe effectively erases subjects from the universe. We are no longer active agents constituting the world, engaged with each other, but rather so many concatenations of ‘atoms in the void’. This material nihilism not only has the potential to demoralize us sufficiently to give our liver away to a stranger knocking at our door, but it can conceal, or at least obscure the very real social and political factors which converge to create the challenges we confront by focusing only by their physical facets.
Lewontin considers several cases of this, such as tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century. Whilst the disease is proximately the tubercle bacillus, the distal or ultimate cause was the implementation of industrial capitalism that created the disastrous conditions which made people susceptible to the bacillus. Or, as Lewontin puts it, the tubercle bacillus was but the agent of the more substantial cause. (Lewontin 41-45) The same variety of obfuscation can be seen in many quarters. One can look at the proliferation of cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. Often the accounting of their ‘causes’ are more or less merely physicalist. Yet by and large those physical causes are merely proximate. They are most often agents of social, political and economic causes for which we are responsible. This, it should be stressed, is not to imply some ‘blaming’ of individuals who are afflicted by the tragedies of illness. It is rather to direct our focus to the manner in which the system of political economy in which we have ensconced ourselves has had serious and damaging consequences for our well being and relationships, consequences which suggest that that system of political economy should be transcended.
I use the word political economy advisedly: the trope of ‘economics’ as a domain unto itself is itself a misleading if not outrightly deceptive one: the suggestion that there are ‘laws of the market place’ to which we are inexorably bound is but a variation on the perils of reductionism that we have cursorily glanced here. By appending the designator ‘political’, we are recalled to the reality that there is nothing inexorable about the financial sphere, and that the laws and customs which constitute it are themselves the outcome of human decision. But this is somewhat to digress. To return to Lewontin in closing. Having reflected on how reductionism, whether of the genetic or environmental sort is inadequate, he draws out this ultimately encouraging conclusion.
Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible. In Simone de Beauvoir’s clever but deep apothegm, a human being is “l’être dont l’être est de d’être pas,” the being whose essence is in not having an essence.
History far transcends any narrow limitations that are claimed for either the power of genes or the power of the environment to circumscribe us...They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. (Lewontin 123)
For a more extensive consideration of genetic and environmental determinism, check out my thoughts here: Biology As Ideology
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