The medieval world Book

A very interesting and well-written book. It is a concise argument against reductionist interpretations of organisms (whether that be to genetics or to environmental adaptation). He does this in two main ways: the first is that he critiques interpretations that are generally reductionist, starting with guiding metaphor and general conceptions guiding research. One review mentioned that the opponents are illusions; there are, e.g., no genetic determinists in the way Lewontin writes. I didn't read Lewontin in quite this way, though admitted there are some points where he talks like that. He mentions throughout the book that nothing he says in Chs 1-3 is revolutionary; it's information known by *all* biologists. (Note: I am not one, and this was my first book in this general topic.) His point rather seems to be that biologists will tend to stick to a reductionist way of investigation, and just sort of ignore the other stuff while doing their experiments. It's not about biologists having absurdly reductionist views; it's about the field of biology concentrating on methods of research that require reductionist assumptions, e.g., with genetic perturbations. So I don't think that reviewer's criticism is quite on point. I do wish Lewontin had engaged with other scholars more directly though, just to get a better sense of the debate.

The second way is to point out "developmental noise," and here is where I wish Lewontin did a bit more. It just seemed a bit of a murky notion throughout the book, and the last chapter was a slight disappointment in that Lewontin basically just said, "Look we need to study this stuff." Included in developmental noise are sequences of gene mutations (rather than singular significant mutations), causal impact loops between gene, organism, and environment, and perhaps a couple others that I'm forgetting now. But then he spends some time (in Ch 3) talking about the influence of shape in genetic coding-- is this developmental noise? That seems a little strange, and it also seems a lot different from the others, which involve causal particularities/idiosyncracies in patterns. In any case, this thread of the book weaved in and out the text in a kind of suggestive way, and I wish he had given it some more robust attention at the end.

But the writing is superb and concise, which makes the book all the more enjoyable and impressive. It really stimulated my interest in many of these topics.