Richard Levins
Encyclopedia
Richard "Dick" Levins is a mathematical ecologist, and political activist
. He is best known for his work on evolution
in changing environments
.
Levins' writing and speaking is extremely condensed. This, combined with his Marxism
has made his analyses less well known than those of some other ecologists and evolutionists adept at popularization. One story of his Chicago
years is that graduate students had to attend Levins' courses three times: the first time to acclimate to the speed of his delivery and the difficulty of his mathematics
; the second to get the basic ideas down; and the third to pick up the subtleties and profundities.
Levins also has written on philosophical issues in biology
and modelling
. An influential article of his is "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology". He has influenced a number of contemporary philosophers of biology. Levins is a Marxist, and has said that the methodology in his Evolution in Changing Environments is based on the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse
, the rough draft of Das Kapital
. With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin
, Levins has written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology. Many of these are collected in The Dialectical Biologist. In 2007, the duo published a second thematic collection of essays titled Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Argriculture, and Health.
Also with Lewontin, Levins has co-authored a number of satirical articles criticizing sociobiology
, systems modeling in ecology, and other topics under the pseudonym Isadore Nabi. Levins and Lewontin managed to place a ridiculous biography of Nabi and his achievements in American Men of Science, thereby showing how little editorial care and fact-checking work went on in that respected reference work.
on June 1, 1930. He recorded reminiscences of his politically and scientifically precocious childhood in an article in Red Diapers
. At age 10, Levins was inspired by the essays of the Marxist biological polymath J. B. S. Haldane
, whom Levins considers the equal of Albert Einstein
in scientific importance.
Levins studied agriculture
and mathematics at Cornell
. He married Puerto Rican writer Rosario Morales in 1950. Blacklisted on his graduation from Cornell, he and Rosario moved to Puerto Rico where they farmed and did rural organizing. They returned to New York in 1956, where he got his PhD at Columbia University
. Levins taught at the University of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1967 and was a prominent member of the Puerto Rican independence movement. He visited Cuba for the first time in 1964, beginning a lifelong scientific and political collaboration with Cuban biologists. His active participation in the independence and anti-war movements in Puerto Rico led to his being denied tenure at the University of Puerto Rico, and in 1967 he and Rosario and their three children moved to Chicago, where he taught at the University of Chicago and constantly interacted with Lewontin. Both later moved to Harvard with the sponsorship of E. O. Wilson, with whom they had later disputes over sociobiology. Levins was elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences but resigned because of the Academy's role in advising the US military.
Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has been a member of the US and Puerto Rican Communist Parties, the Moviiento Pro Independencia and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and was on an FBI surveillance list. During the last two decades Levins has concentrated on application of ecology to agriculture, particularly in the less developed nations.
assumed the environment to be constant, while mathematical ecology assumed the genetic makeup of the species involved to be constant. Levins modelled the situation in which evolution is taking place while the environment changes. One of the surprising consequences of his model is that selection need not maximize adaptation, and that species can select themselves to extinction. He encapsulated his major early results in Evolution in Changing Environments, a book based on lectures he delivered in Cuba in the early 1960s. Levins made extensive use of mathematics, some of which he invented himself, although it had been previously developed in other areas of pure mathematics or economics without his awareness of it. For instance Levins makes extensive use of convex set theory for fitness sets, (resembling the economic formulations of J. R. Hicks) and extends Sewall Wright
's path analysis to the analysis of causal feedback loops.
Levins, R. "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology", American Scientist, 54:421-431, 1966
Levins, R. Evolution in Changing Environments, Princeton University Press, 1968.
Levins, R. "Evolution in communities near equilibrium", in M. L. Cody and J.M. Diamond (eds) Ecology and Evolution of Communities, Harvard University Press, 1975.
Nabi, I., (pseud.) "An Evolutionary Interpretation of the English Sonnet: First Annual Piltdown Man Lecture on Man and Society," Science and Nature, no. 3, 1980, 71-73.
Levins, R. and R.C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, 1985.
Puccia, C.J. and Levins, R. Qualitative Modeling of Complex Systems: An Introduction to loop Analysis and Time Averaging, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 1986.
Levins, R. and Vandermeer, J. "The agroecosystem embedded in a complex ecological community" in: Carroll R.C., Vandermeer J. and Rosset P., eds., Agroecology, New York: Wiley and Sons, 1990.
Grove E.A., Kocic V.L., Ladas G. and Levins R. "Periodicity in a simple genotype selection model" in Diff Eq and Dynamical Systems 1(1):35-50, 1993.
Levins, R. "Ten propositions on science and antiscience" in Social Text, 46/47:101–111, 1996.
Levins, R. "Touch Red," in Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing up in the Communist Left, U. of Illinois, 1998, pp. 257–266.
Levins, R. Dialectics and systems theory in Science and Society 62(3):373-399, 1998.
Levins, R. "The internal and external in explanatory theories", Science as Culture, 7(4):557–582, 1998.
Levins, R. and Lopez C. "Toward an ecosocial view of health", International Journal of Health Services 29(2):261-293, 1999.
Levins, R. "Whose Scientific Method? Scientific Methods for a Complex World, New Solutions", "A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy" 13(3) 261-274 (2003)
R.C. Lewontin and R. Levins, "Biology Under The Influence, Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health," New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007.
Activism
Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...
. He is best known for his work on evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
in changing environments
Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving , physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water and sunlight....
.
Levins' writing and speaking is extremely condensed. This, combined with his Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
has made his analyses less well known than those of some other ecologists and evolutionists adept at popularization. One story of his Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
years is that graduate students had to attend Levins' courses three times: the first time to acclimate to the speed of his delivery and the difficulty of his mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
; the second to get the basic ideas down; and the third to pick up the subtleties and profundities.
Levins also has written on philosophical issues in biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
and modelling
Scientific modelling
Scientific modelling is the process of generating abstract, conceptual, graphical and/or mathematical models. Science offers a growing collection of methods, techniques and theory about all kinds of specialized scientific modelling...
. An influential article of his is "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology". He has influenced a number of contemporary philosophers of biology. Levins is a Marxist, and has said that the methodology in his Evolution in Changing Environments is based on the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse
Grundrisse
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is a lengthy manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx, completed in 1858. However, as it existed primarily as a collection of unedited notes, the work remained unpublished until 1939...
, the rough draft of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
. With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin
Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to...
, Levins has written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology. Many of these are collected in The Dialectical Biologist. In 2007, the duo published a second thematic collection of essays titled Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Argriculture, and Health.
Also with Lewontin, Levins has co-authored a number of satirical articles criticizing sociobiology
Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
, systems modeling in ecology, and other topics under the pseudonym Isadore Nabi. Levins and Lewontin managed to place a ridiculous biography of Nabi and his achievements in American Men of Science, thereby showing how little editorial care and fact-checking work went on in that respected reference work.
Biography
Levins was born in New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
on June 1, 1930. He recorded reminiscences of his politically and scientifically precocious childhood in an article in Red Diapers
Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left
Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left is the first anthology of autobiographical writings by "Red Diaper Babies" — children of communist or other radical-left parents. Edited by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, it consists of memoirs, short stories, and poems...
. At age 10, Levins was inspired by the essays of the Marxist biological polymath J. B. S. Haldane
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS , known as Jack , was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford and moved to India and became an Indian citizen...
, whom Levins considers the equal of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
in scientific importance.
Levins studied agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
and mathematics at Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
. He married Puerto Rican writer Rosario Morales in 1950. Blacklisted on his graduation from Cornell, he and Rosario moved to Puerto Rico where they farmed and did rural organizing. They returned to New York in 1956, where he got his PhD at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. Levins taught at the University of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1967 and was a prominent member of the Puerto Rican independence movement. He visited Cuba for the first time in 1964, beginning a lifelong scientific and political collaboration with Cuban biologists. His active participation in the independence and anti-war movements in Puerto Rico led to his being denied tenure at the University of Puerto Rico, and in 1967 he and Rosario and their three children moved to Chicago, where he taught at the University of Chicago and constantly interacted with Lewontin. Both later moved to Harvard with the sponsorship of E. O. Wilson, with whom they had later disputes over sociobiology. Levins was elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences but resigned because of the Academy's role in advising the US military.
Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has been a member of the US and Puerto Rican Communist Parties, the Moviiento Pro Independencia and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and was on an FBI surveillance list. During the last two decades Levins has concentrated on application of ecology to agriculture, particularly in the less developed nations.
Evolution in changing environments
Prior to Levins' work, population geneticsPopulation genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
assumed the environment to be constant, while mathematical ecology assumed the genetic makeup of the species involved to be constant. Levins modelled the situation in which evolution is taking place while the environment changes. One of the surprising consequences of his model is that selection need not maximize adaptation, and that species can select themselves to extinction. He encapsulated his major early results in Evolution in Changing Environments, a book based on lectures he delivered in Cuba in the early 1960s. Levins made extensive use of mathematics, some of which he invented himself, although it had been previously developed in other areas of pure mathematics or economics without his awareness of it. For instance Levins makes extensive use of convex set theory for fitness sets, (resembling the economic formulations of J. R. Hicks) and extends Sewall Wright
Sewall Wright
Sewall Green Wright was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. With R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, he was a founder of theoretical population genetics. He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of...
's path analysis to the analysis of causal feedback loops.
Awards
- Edinburgh Medal in Science and Society
- Lukacs 21st Century Award (for his contributions to mathematical ecology)
- Numerous awards in Puerto Rico and Cuba (for contributions to ecology and agriculture. most recently 30th Anniversary Medal of the Cuban Academy of Sciences)
- Honorary Doctorate from the University of HavanaUniversity of HavanaThe University of Havana or UH is a university located in the Vedado district of Havana, Cuba. Founded in 1728, the University of Havana is the oldest university in Cuba, and one of the first to be founded in the Americas...
- American Public Health Association's 2007 Milton Terris Global Health Award
Selected bibliography
Levins, R. "Genetic Consequences of Natural Selection," in Talbot Waterman and Harold Morowitz, eds., Theoretical and Mathematical Biology, Yale, 1965, pp. 372–387.Levins, R. "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology", American Scientist, 54:421-431, 1966
Levins, R. Evolution in Changing Environments, Princeton University Press, 1968.
Levins, R. "Evolution in communities near equilibrium", in M. L. Cody and J.M. Diamond (eds) Ecology and Evolution of Communities, Harvard University Press, 1975.
Nabi, I., (pseud.) "An Evolutionary Interpretation of the English Sonnet: First Annual Piltdown Man Lecture on Man and Society," Science and Nature, no. 3, 1980, 71-73.
Levins, R. and R.C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, 1985.
Puccia, C.J. and Levins, R. Qualitative Modeling of Complex Systems: An Introduction to loop Analysis and Time Averaging, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 1986.
Levins, R. and Vandermeer, J. "The agroecosystem embedded in a complex ecological community" in: Carroll R.C., Vandermeer J. and Rosset P., eds., Agroecology, New York: Wiley and Sons, 1990.
Grove E.A., Kocic V.L., Ladas G. and Levins R. "Periodicity in a simple genotype selection model" in Diff Eq and Dynamical Systems 1(1):35-50, 1993.
Levins, R. "Ten propositions on science and antiscience" in Social Text, 46/47:101–111, 1996.
Levins, R. "Touch Red," in Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds., Red Diapers: Growing up in the Communist Left, U. of Illinois, 1998, pp. 257–266.
Levins, R. Dialectics and systems theory in Science and Society 62(3):373-399, 1998.
Levins, R. "The internal and external in explanatory theories", Science as Culture, 7(4):557–582, 1998.
Levins, R. and Lopez C. "Toward an ecosocial view of health", International Journal of Health Services 29(2):261-293, 1999.
Levins, R. "Whose Scientific Method? Scientific Methods for a Complex World, New Solutions", "A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy" 13(3) 261-274 (2003)
R.C. Lewontin and R. Levins, "Biology Under The Influence, Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health," New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007.