Richard Lewontin, review by Pat Boran

It Ain't Necessarily So. Richard Lewontin. Granta Books, 2000.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Business Post, Ireland. 04 June 2000)

'While there may be genes for the shape of our heads, there cannot be any for the shape of our ideas.' So writes Richard Lewontin in the Introduction to this marvelous and thought-provoking collection of essay-length book reviews, originally published in The New York Review over a period of some 20 years.

What makes Lewontin so rewarding is the fact that, given the space, he deals in such detail with the books under review, identifying assumptions and beliefs not just in the writers themselves but in biological science as a whole.

It has been noted elsewhere how science fiction (a barometer to the human psyche, if ever there was one) has, over the last twenty years or so, increasingly come down from the stars and moved ever closer to home. And it is interesting to see that Lewontin identifies this same movement in science fact, as it were, from astronomy to biology to genetics. Just as the monsters of sci-fi movies are now more likely to be inside the human body (think of Alien, for instance), or at least to be meddling with genes, DNA, viruses and bacteria where their predecessors meddled with ray-guns and so on, the real focus, and the target of most research and research finance, is now the body. (Ask NASA.) In particular, it is the much-publicised Human Genome Project. There is also the additional reason that, after the war, and given 'the hubris of physicists' who believed they would soon explain everything, 'the only interesting field left was biology'.

In a sense it's strange that Lewontin doesn't here quote Alexander Pope who seemed to predict all this back in 1734 when he wrote in Moral Essays: 'The proper study of mankind is man.' Indeed, moral essays is a fair description of what Lewontin himself is engaged in, and he is not afraid to reach conclusions or challenge 'experts' (supported by wide learning and a distrust of Unified Field Theories of anything, genetics included). On the issue of racial equality, for instance, he concludes that 19th century scientists simply rigged the data which suggested that whites were smarter than non-whites, and he's under no illusions that such rigging is a thing of the past. 'Racist scientists,' as he puts it, 'produce racist science.'

The on-going debate about nature and nurture (that is, about what we are born with versus what happens to us after) prompts a reminder that Charles Darwin was 'the inheritor rather than the creator of the view that life evolved'. And with this out of the way, Lewontin then procedes straight to the heart of this particular matter: what evolution means to God.

The entomologist JBS Haldane's famous response to the question of what he could deduce from his work about the nature of God -- 'An inordinate fondness for beatles' -- is quoted here, but the God question is pursued further. The popular version of God simply doesn't fit with what is now known of the natural world. As Lewontin has it: 'He may just decide to stop the sun, even if He hasn't done so yet. Science cannot coexist with such a God.' The resulting manner in which the creationist movement in the US Bible Belt, for instance, has thrown out all science rather than re-evaluate inherited notions of God, makes for alarming reading, and Lewontin is perceptive in seeing in this reaction a darker side of the pioneering mindset, a mindset which almost automatically opposes change originating outside of it, in the land it has left behind and which is supposed to remain timeless and mythical. (Readers will remember that among the things that 'ain't necessarily so' in the Gershwin song which gives this book its title are 'Things that you're liable / To read in the Bible'.)

That other major bugbear of evolutionary theory -- acquired characteristics -- is also treated in fascinating detail. In its simplest form, acquired characteristics is the notion that what one generation practices and learns -- boxing, for instance, or high jump technique -- will be passed on to the next. Far from dismissing it as a fantasy of Lamarck and a handful of others, Lewontin points out that even Darwin himself 'flirted' with it -- though it took the Nazi dream of an Aryan race to show the complete and obscene stupidity of the idea.

Lewontin's aim here is to examine how this and other discredited notions still linger in the popular mind, just as the nature/nurture confusion still colours popular perceptions. His biggest target, however, is the Human Genome Project, and his irritation shows when he has to correct, yet again, the impression that a catalogue of genes will be a recipe book for life -- 'First, DNA is not self-reproducing; second, it makes nothing; and third, organisms are not determined by it'. Wittily, but with strong political reverberations, he also asks the important, often forgotten question: Whose genome will be mapped? Whose genetic blueprint will represent the ideal for humankind?

n this volume at least, Lewontin is a slightly less colourful, less anecdotal writer than say Stephen Jay Gould, though his take on Dickens' Oliver Twist for example -- whose 'blood was upper-middle-class, though his nourishment was gruel' -- points yet again towards political and moral issues and shows that, even when focussed on the miniscule, like the best science writers he is aware of the implications of the bigger picture.