April 10, 2008
Evolutionary biologist to speak on organism-environment interaction
Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz research professor emeritus of comparative zoology at Harvard University, will deliver a free Jessie and John Danz lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 15, in 130 Kane.
In his presentation, titled Organism and Environment: The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution, Lewontin will argue that the distinction between internal and external forces of evolutionary change, first articulated by Darwin, is a barrier to further scientific and political progress.
Instead, it is now clear that all organisms actively create and alter the environments in which they live, so that every internal physical change induces a change in the corresponding environment. A direct consequence of such codetermination is that organisms and their environments coevolve. The implications of such knowledge for the sciences of ecology and evolution, as well as for the elaboration of a rational environmental politics, will be discussed.
Lewontin is an evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator who has worked in experimental and theoretical aspects of genetics and evolution.
His experimental work helped demonstrate the large amount of genetic variation that exists within species and the importance of changes in the relative reproductive fitnesses of different types of organisms in a population as a result of so-called “frequency-dependent selection.” His theoretical work has concentrated on the dynamics of genetic changes in populations when natural selection acts on linked genes and the dynamics of genetic change when reproductive fitness is frequency dependent. He is also widely recognized as an incisive critic of public misconceptions of evolutionary biology and the misuse of science.
Lewontin has won many prestigious awards and fellowships including the Fulbright Fellowship, the National Science Foundation’s Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Sewell Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists. Nevertheless, he sees his most useful contribution to evolutionary studies as having helped in the formation of a large group, first at the University of Chicago and then Harvard, of independent and interacting biologists, historians and philosophers of science — scholars who represent a vibrant and constantly renewing intellectual community.
Lewontin is the author of numerous scientific publications and more popular works, including The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, And Human Nature, The Dialectical Biologist, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, and The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. His most recent book, co-authored with Richard Levins, is titled Biology Under The Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health.
