Word: lewontin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...here's to Davis, Trivers, him and Lewontin...
...make peace between Lewontin and Davis...
...waves through the academic community. Sociobiology is the study of the biological basis for social behavior in every species; its practitioners believe that some-and perhaps much-of human behavior is genetically determined. It is not a message that many academics want to hear. Says Harvard's Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist: "This is fundamentally a very conservative world view, which serves the very important function of saying that there is no sense in rocking the boat-we are what our genes make us-and I think that's bullshit." Lewontin is hardly alone. Marxist anthropologists criticize sociobiology...
Harvard's Lewontin dismisses theories like these as "barroom generalizations." Indeed, sociobiologists seem prone to concoct theories to explain a wide array of human problems. Harvard Biologist Robert L. Trivers presented the convention with his sociobiological view of parent-child relationships. Conflict is built in, he said, because parents divide their genetic investment-and their attention-among their children; while each child has a 100% investment in itself and struggles for 100% of the parents' time...
...also make little impact on American psychologists who believe that heredity is crucial to intelligence; they have produced several twin studies similar to Burt's. Says Herrnstein, "I know of no correlation of Burt's which is seriously challenged in the literature." But Harvard's Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist, says that Burt's work with twins "is the only large study which is methodologically correct, so its loss is no trivial problem for the heritability people. It is also not nice for them to have this mess in their backyard...