Search results
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Richard Lewontin/Population Biologist/Harvard - First scientist to lay out a genetic argument against race in 1972 What does this mean?, Lewontin's discussion of the Dionne Quintuplets, Lewontin studied and more.
Richard Lewontin. an evolutionary geneticist from Harvard University and one of the leading human population geneticists, has shown that about 85% of all identified human genetic variation occurs "between any two individuals from the same ethnic group (Irish).
Based on genetic studies by Richard Lewontin and others, are there significant DNA differences between racial groups? (Do people of the same "race" have more genetic similarities when compared to people of a different "race")?
- Overview
- Related Articles
Download PDF
Richard Lewontin was a groundbreaking geneticist, best known for bringing molecular tools into evolutionary biology and for his advocacy against the use of science to rationalize structural inequity. Lewontin and his collaborators revealed how natural selection acts to shape variation, exploring its effect on genes, groups and individuals. Moving between mathematical and statistical analysis, fieldwork and laboratory experiment, they set the course of molecular population genetics. Lewontin saw no place for his discipline in attempts to explain why “the children of oil magnates tend to become bankers, while the children of oil workers tend to be in debt to banks”.
Lewontin’s sometimes controversial critiques of science, often from a Marxist perspective, inspired new thinking on the relationship between science, politics and society. He was an outspoken critic of sociobiology and adaptationism (the idea that all traits evolved as adaptations of an organism to its environment). He despised the use of biology to justify racist ideology, especially with regard to IQ testing. His celebrated essay ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm’, written with his colleague Stephen Jay Gould (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. 205, 581–598; 1979) skewered, among other things, a “reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales”. Lewontin has died aged 92.
Richard Lewontin was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in New York City, and originally studied biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1950s. At the time, Harvard had no faculty member specializing in genetics, so Lewontin studied with a visitor, Leslie C. Dunn, from Columbia University in New York City. Dunn persuaded Lewontin to join the Columbia laboratory of Theodosius Dobzhansky, then the most influential evolutionary geneticist in the world. Lewontin adopted Dobzhansky’s investigation of the nature of selection and its impact on the variability of natural and laboratory populations. He completed his PhD in 1954.
That year, Lewontin joined the faculty at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Here, he focused primarily on mathematical population genetics and worked with Ken-Ichi Kojima on genetic linkage, the tendency of neighbouring genetic sequences to be inherited together. After periods at the University of Rochester, New York, and the University of Chicago, Illinois, he spent the rest of his career at Harvard.
During his time at Rochester in the early 1960s, attempts to study genetic variation in natural populations were approaching an impasse. On a visit to the University of Chicago, Lewontin met Jack Hubby, who was adapting the biochemical technique of electrophoresis (which separates molecules by charge and size) to study the fruit fly Drosophila. They realized that detecting small differences between proteins could provide a new means of measuring genetic variability.
- Michael R. Dietrich
- 2021
Sep 3, 2021 · In 1972, Lewontin took his interest in genetic diversity in an explicitly political direction when he published a paper demonstrating that only about 6 percent of human genetic variation exists...
Nov 25, 2021 · In condemning Arthur Jensen’s treatise about race and IQ, Lewontin cleverly compared him with Dutch Bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638). Jansen taught that certain people were predestined to be saved, others damned, good works irrelevant, and free will an illusion.
People also ask
What was Lewontin's contribution to racial classification?
Why was Richard Lewontin important?
What did Lewontin discover about genetic diversity?
What did Lewontin say about racial inequalities?
He is the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Rutgers University Press, 2005), The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America (Dutton Press, 2005), and Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (with Alan Goodman; Columbia University Press, 2021).
