[no subject]

To: Retort

From: IB

Dick Lewontin, one half of the bad twins of biology (Levins and Lewontin The Dialectical Biologist)  will be giving two lectures this week:

"Gene, Organism and Environment: Bad Metaphors and Good Biology"
(Tuesday, November 18, 2003 - 4:10 p.m.)

and

"The Concept of Race:
The Confusion of Social and Biological Reality"

(Wednesday, November 19, 2003 - 4:10 p.m.)

International House Auditorium, 2299 Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley (corner of Bancroft)

Strongly recommended. Lewontin is that rara avis, a working scientist with a radical cast of mind who is also a public intellectual, insofar as there are such today. He has been tireless on our behalf in his critiques of racist and sexist sociobiology, the human genome project and reductionist science in general. His classic demolition of the naturalizing of hierarchy and social power, and of branding by IQ (Not in Our Genes, co-authored with Rose and Kamin) remains grotesquely apt.