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

Lewontin, Richard

3.81

130 ratings by Goodreads

9780940322103: It Ain't Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0940322102 ISBN 13: 9780940322103

Publisher: New York Review of Books, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Stephen Jay Gould calls Richard Lewontin "simply the smartest man I have ever met." And not the least opinionated, either. Lewontin has long been famous among biologists for a volatile combination of feisty leftism, scientific insight, and verbal skill, which have been displayed for the more general public in his essays for what has been called The New York Review of Each Other's Books.

It Ain't Necessarily So is a collection of some of his more characteristic reviews from the 1980s and 1990s. The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould; Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson; sociological studies of Sex in America; and Ruth Hubbard's books on gender in science: all his essays are informative yet lively, with a high acid content--as when he begins his piece on the Human Genome Project with a definition of "fetish."

Lewontin's prose is worth reading in itself, but what lifts this anthology to another level is that it also includes replies and rebuttals selected from the New York Review's letters column--a forum that doubles as the intellectual's World Wrestling Federation. For the older pieces, he also includes updates, "where are they now" summaries to give a sense of historical change in each field. Assertive, brilliant, sarcastic, dense, wide-ranging--Lewontin may be challenging, but he is never dull. --Mary Ellen Curtin

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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.