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

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

1 " The interpenetration of chance and determination bears on the problem of how there can be a scientific approach to society when individual human behavior and consciousness seem unpredictable. Those who despair to point out that people are not machines, that there are subjective processes in the making of decisions, that it is not 'classes' but individuals who make choices. Terms such as "the human factor" or "subjective factors" with their implication of chance and unpredictability are invoked as the negation of regularity and lawfulness. And indeed it is true that individual behavior and consciousness are the consequences of intersection of a large number of weakly determining factors. But it does not follow that where there is choice, subjectivity, and individuality there cannon also be predictability. The error to take the individual as causally prior to the whole and not to appreciate that the social has causal properties within which individual consciousness and action are formed. While the consciousness of an individual is not determined by his/her class position but is influenced by idiosyncratic factors that appear as random, those random factors operate within a domain and with probabilities that are constrained and directed by social forces. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

2 " Narrowness and pragmatism are characteristic of the dominant ways of thought under capitalism, where the individualism of economic man is a model for the autonomy and isolation of all phenomena, and where a knowledge industry turns scientific ideas into marketable commodities—precisely the magic bullets that the pharmaceutical industry sells people. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

3 " For Darwinian biology the organism is the nexus of the internal and external forces. It is only through natural selection of internally produced variations, which happen to match by chance the externally generated environmental demands, that what is outside and what is inside confront each other. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

4 " Biology Under the Influence is a collection of our essays built around the general theme of the dual nature of science. On the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

5 " Although gravitation is an important force in the immediate environment of large objects like trees and human beings, it is not felt by bacteria in a liquid medium. For them, because of their size, Brownian motion is a dominant environmental factor, while we are not buffeted to and fro by bombarding molecules. But that size disparity is a consequence of genetic differences between life-forms, so just as environment is a factor in the development of an organism, so genes are a factor in the construction of the environment. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health

6 " On the one hand, science is the generic development of human knowledge over the millennia, but on the other it is the increasingly commodified specific product of a capitalist knowledge industry. "

― Richard C. Lewontin , Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health