Reviews for The triple helix

The average rating for The triple helix based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-10-29 00:00:00 Joshua Boucher I agree with the basic sentiments of this book which are that human thought and behavior are a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors and shouldn't be glossed over with simplistic "Nature" or "Nurture" explanations (which is what gives this one star in addition to what otherwise would just be one by its lonesome). HOWEVER, what I take serious issue with is that Lewontin and his ideological compatriot Stephen Jay Gould (and others, less visibly), are hysterical in their fear of people positing a more blunt form of genetic determinism. I simply don't know where these scientists are that disregard environmental factors and think humans=genes. And the scientists and philosophers whom have received the most vicious and ridiculously misrepresentative criticisms from the Gould-Lewontin camp (namely E.O. Wilson, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker) I can say for certain, from personal research, are not guilty of these mistakes (genetic determinism, ultra-adaptionism, "Darwinian fundamentalism", etc) in the slightest. I've spent a fair amount of time arguing about these issues with people and will probably add some more details to this review later. For the moment I'll leave a few links to short pieces that support my point of view here: 1. An extremely excellent and short essay (adapted from his book Freedom Evolves) about these broadly construed intellectual battles that is well-worth reading: The Mythical Threat of Genetic Determinism by Daniel Dennett "Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment." "Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends." 2. In response to Gould's absurd, strawman-riddled article "Darwinian Fundamentalism": Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange by Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker "So where's the controversy? Gould claims his targets invoke selection to explain everything. They don't. Everyone agrees that aspects of the living world without adaptive complexity'numbers of species, nonfunctional features, trends in the fossil record'often need different kinds of explanations, from genetic drift to wayward asteroids. So yes, we all should be, and are, pluralists. But we should not be indiscriminate pluralists." "A rejection of Gould's theory does not put nonadaptive features "outside the compass of evolutionary psychology"; nor was Gould the first to call attention to them. The original arguments for recognizing nonadaptive features came from the founding document of evolutionary psychology, George Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection, long before Gould and Lewontin reiterated them (without attribution) in their "Spandrels" paper. Nonadaptive explanations have been commonplace in the field ever since, as Gould must be well aware, for in one column he touted a nonadaptive explanation of the female orgasm taken from another founder of evolutionary psychology, Donald Symons. According to the most popular view in the field, many other important human activities are spandrels, including art, music, religion, science, and dreams. Gould's accusation is not even close to being accurate." 3. Letter to the Editor of The New York Review of Books on Stephen Jay Gould's "Darwinian Fundamentalism" (June 12, 1997) and "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism" (June 26, 1997) John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UCSB July 7, 1997 "For biologists, the central problem is that Gould's own exposition of evolutionary biology is so radically and extravagantly at variance with both the actual consensus state of the field and the plain meaning of the primary literature that there is no easy way to communicate the magnitude of the discrepancy in a way that could be believed by those who have not experienced the evidence for themselves." More on all of this later...

Review # 2 was written on 2020-03-09 00:00:00 Mickey Baker 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.