How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world.

In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.

For many years, Lewontin has written for the New York Review of Books. In 1990, he responded to a review of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", in which he asks, ARE WE ROBOTS?

Maynard Smith again juxtaposes a "fact" about people with an assumption of motivation. "The people who are going to like this book best, however, will probably be those who don't understand it. As an evolutionary biologist, I have learned over the years that most people do not want to see themselves as lumbering robots programmed to ensure the survival of their genes."

Unless he has been carrying out a stratified sampling poll of Great Britain, John surely means "most literate and educated people, professors, students and people who write letters to the editors", since those are the people that he, and I, mostly know and hear from. But if what he says about them is true, then they are extraordinary masochists as well. They have made a best-seller out of The Selfish Gene in which the robot metaphor first appeared, and a popular intellectual figure and modest academic success out of its previously undistinguished author, Richard Dawkins.

With enemies like these, people have no need of friends. Of all the vulgar errors about biology presently circulating, the notion that we are "lumbering robots blindly programmed" by our genes which "control us body and mind" (Dawkins' original dictum) is surely the most popular by a long shot.

Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health