Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin

Session 3: Rasmus Winther, 9-10:30

Towards an Oceanic Philosophy of Nature with a Little Help from Levins and Lewontin’s Dialectics

This paper proposes an oceanic philosophy of nature that reorients philosophical inquiry away from anthropocentric and hyper-abstract foundations toward a richly textured, ecologically embedded, and dialectically engaged view of life and the world. Taking inspiration from Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist (1985), as well as from thinkers such as Arne Næss, Val Plumwood, and Lynn Margulis, I argue for a philosophy of nature rooted in the oceans. One strand of this philosophy, inspired by Lewontin, is dialectics: a mode of thought attuned to contradiction, interpenetration, and the generative tensions between organism and environment, science and ethics, stability and change.

Session 4: Christopher Shambaugh, 10:45-12:00

Dialectical Biology as Ideology Critique

In the manuscripts that have come to be known as The German Ideology, Marx and Engels famously identified philosophy as a primary avatar of ideological legitimation and distortion in the modern world, alongside religion and the liberal state. Yet, in much Marxist orthodoxy, natural science has been considered uniquely immune to such ideological entanglement. In this presentation, I argue that Levins and Lewontin’s vision of dialectical biology offers a nuanced and powerful challenge to that assumption. More specifically, I contend that Levins and Lewontin defined dialectical biology by the essential aim of advancing science through the critique of scientific ideologies.

In the first section, “I. Dialectics of Biology,” I begin with important historical and philosophical context for determining the basic contours of Levins and Lewontin’s concept of dialectical biology. In the second section, “II. Evolution as Theory and Ideology,” I reconstruct Lewontin’s analyses of the core tenets of classical and “superficial” Darwinism, before turning to his and Levins’ developed account of their ideological underpinnings and implications. In the third section, “III. A Dialectical Theory of Evolution,” I show that many of Levins and Lewontin’s contributions to evolutionary biology were informed by their critiques of scientific ideologies arising from the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, such as adaptationism and gene-centrism. In the fourth section, “IV. Dialectical Biology and Biological Agency,” I briefly examine the legacy of dialectical biology in the present, outlining the influence of Levins and Lewontin’s ideas in contemporary ecological developmental biology, niche construction theory, and philosophy of biology. I then close with some reflections on the social and political implications of these recent developments.

Session 5: Denis Walsh, 1:15-2:30

The Constitutively Perspectival: A Metaphysics for Dialectical Biology

Starting from Lewontin's critique of the orthodox organism/environment relation, I argue that as agents organisms and their environment constitute a causally intermingled system. The organism's experience of its world is jointly constituted by the features (goals, capacities, structures) of the organism, and those of the environment, in a way that resists decomposition. Drawing on related insights from Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, and J.J. Gibson, I argue that to be an organism is in part to take a particular perspective on the environment. In taking this perspective organisms partially constitute the world they experience (hence the 'constitutively perspectival'). We can make sense to the attempt in The Dialectical Biologist to dissolve a range of traditional distinctions---organism/environment, nature/nurture, inheritance/development---if we understand that it is implicitly positing a constitutively perspectival metaphysics.

Session 6: Jonathan Basile, 2:45-4:00

Norms of Reaction and Reactionary Norms: Richard Lewontin, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Heritability Estimates

Richard Lewontin's work is defined by two motives that sometimes come into conflict. His sweeping theoretical critiques destabilize basic concepts of evolutionary science, and he sometimes must shy away from his own most radical insights in an attempt to put forward a positive vision for scientific practice. I will examine his critiques of heritability estimates and quantitative genetics, focusing on his 1974 "The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes." He puts forward sweeping criticisms there that have been repeated many times since—Evelyn Fox Keller's The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture revisits similar debates, in 2010, while asking why the same misunderstands have recurred for at least a helf century. Lewontin suggests that the norm of reaction surpasses the genetic reductionism of heritability estimates, and Keller suggests that developmental biology allows to pose questions about how traits actually form that quantitative genetics has only obscured. Nonetheless, I will demonstrate that the differentiality and the abeyance of true causes returns in both developmental biology and in the representation of plasticity in the form of a norm of reaction. To this end, I will examine Sonia Sultan's recent work on the multi-generational or "unscripted" norm of reaction, which displaces Lewontin's assumption that the norm of reaction can be grounded in the genotype.

Session 7: Stuart Newman, (4:15-5:45)

Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

This talk will present an interpretation of the evolution of multicellular organisms based on (i) the physical inherencies of cell aggregates, (ii) the conserved, intrinsic life-sustaining functionalities of cells, and (iii) the self-motivated agency of cells and cell collectivities. Focusing on the metazoans, it will describe how morphological motifs across all animal phyla -- tissue layers and cavities, segments, appendages -- are physical attractor states in morphospaces of cell clusters that arose with the successive appearance of the "developmental toolkit" genes and their products (e.g., cadherins, Wnt, Notch). I will then describe how partitioning and amplification of processes that are obligatory at the cellular level generated, during multicellular evolution, functionally differentiated cells and organs (e.g., muscle, liver, kidney). In contrast to the gradual appearance of novel forms and functions postulated by adaptationist population biological models, this newer perspective suggests that novelties arising from these often abruptly reconfigured material and cellular inherencies come to characterize distinct evolutionary lineages by serving as enablements for new kinds of organismal agency. This faculty is the basis of niche selection and other creative capabilities that led Richard Lewontin to speak of the organism as subject, not just object, of evolution.

Session 8: Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, 9-10:15

Isidore Nabi and the Metatheoretical Tendencies of Two Dialectical Biologists

One of the least discussed chapters in The Dialectical Biologist is "On the Tendencies of Motion," attributed to Isidore Nabi—originally printed in Science and Nature in 1981 and signed by a made-up figure that became famous for bickering with E.O. Wilson about genetic determinism in the pages of Nature. This piece pointedly critiques the mathematical modeling approaches of late-twentieth-century ecologists by way of parody: imagining what would've happened if Newton's laws of motion were to be 'discovered' by systems ecologists' way of doing science. Nabi's critique, I will argue in this paper, is the perfect place to begin reconsidering Levins and Lewontin's metatheoretical commitments about the 'proper' epistemic activities of science and their relevance for contemporary biology and philosophy of biology. One way of pursuing this project will be to spell out in detail how Levins and Lewontin approached modeling and scientific theorizing in The Dialectical Biologist and elsewhere. This reevaluation will serve to contextualize the scientific and philosophical legacies of Levins and Lewontin's own refurbishing of dialectical biology, as this workshop intends.

Session 9: Andrea Gambarotto & Rebecca Riccardo Cuciniello (they/them), 10:30-11:45

Autonomy in Evolution: A Dialectical View

The talk explores the complex relationship between autonomy and evolution, an area historically underdeveloped in biological autonomy literature. The concept of 'natural drift' introduced by Maturana and Varela in the early 1990s, stands as one of the few attempts to integrate evolution into discussions of autonomy. Unlike the Modern Synthesis (MS), which emphasizes genetic material shaped by natural selection, the idea of natural drift focuses on the role of organismal behavior in evolution. This approach challenges the neo-Darwinian emphasis on populations and lineages, suggesting instead that evolution should be viewed as the historical dimension of intrinsic purposiveness---an expression of organismal agency across generations. Here, autonomy is seen as preceding both reproduction and natural selection, positioning the organism as an active participant in its own evolutionary trajectory rather than merely an object of selective pressures.

Session 10: Fermín Fulda, 12-1:30

Life and the Dialectics of Matter and Form
Although the neo-organicist revival was originally conceived in the dialectical materialist terms of Levins and Lewontin, it has increasingly been developed within a neo-Aristotelian, hylomorphic framework. This essay interrogates that shift: is the turn to form a necessary development of the dialectical insight into organismal activity, or does it represent a departure from the materialist core of that insight? I argue that this tension is rooted in a fundamental disagreement over the locus of activity, crystallized in two opposing arguments: the “argument from passive matter” for hylomorphism and the “argument from active matter” for dialectical materialism. To articulate this dialectic, I distinguish three historical grades of material involvement in each tradition, showing a convergent expansion of matter’s role. The crucial test case is modern active-matter biophysics, whose life-like, self-driven dynamics initially seem to vindicate the dialectical-materialist vision. However, I contend that while active matter explains the physical mechanisms underlying autonomy, it cannot account for its purposive and normative dimensions. Rather than rendering form superfluous, active matter may provide its precise physical realizer.