Biology under the influence : dialectical essays on ecology, agriculture, and health

"Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. In this book, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins break from the confines of determinism and offer a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world." -- BOOK JACKET

Contents include:

The end of natural history? -- The return of old diseases and the appearance of new ones -- False dichotomies -- Chance and necessity -- Organism and environment -- The biological and the social -- How different are natural and social science? -- Does anything new ever happen? -- Life on other worlds -- Are we programmed? -- Evolutionary psychology -- Let the numbers speak -- The politics of averages -- Schmalhausen's law -- A program for biology -- Ten propositions on science and antiscience -- Dialectics and systems theory -- Aspects of whole and parts in population biology -- Strategies of abstraction -- The butterfly ex machina -- Educating the intuition to cope with complexity -- Preparing for uncertainty -- Greypeace -- Genes, environment, and organisms -- The dream of the human genome -- Does culture evolve? -- Is capitalism a disease? The crisis in U.S. public health -- Science and progress : seven developmentalist myths in agriculture -- The maturing of capitalist agriculture : farmer as proletarian -- How Cuba is going ecological -- Living the 11th thesis.