Not in Our Genes
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| Author | Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Leon Kamin |
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| Language | English |
| Subject | Sociobiology |
| Published | 1984 (Pantheon Books) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 322 |
| ISBN | |
Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, neurobiologist Steven Rose and psychologist Leon Kamin, who criticize sociobiology and genetic determinism. The authors, who are informed by Marxism, have been criticized for misrepresenting the views of scientists such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.
Lewontin, Rose and Kamin make a strong statement about the entanglement of science and politics: "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology", and makes the following comparison "If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers". Lewontin, Rose and Kamin discuss and criticize the views of authors such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Donald Symons. They maintain that, like some other sociobiologists, Symons maintains that "the manifest trait is not itself coded by genes, but that a potential is coded and the trait only arises when the appropriate environmental cue is given." In their view, "Despite its superficial appearance of dependence on environment, this model is completely genetically determined, independent of the environment." They write that Symons' arguments in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) provide examples "of how sociobiological theory can explain anything, no matter how contradictory, by a little mental gymnastics".
Ethologist Richard Dawkins reviewed Not in Our Genes in New Scientist, where in reply to Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin's criticism, he defended the "perfectly sensible belief" in reductionist arguments of viewing properties of the whole "in terms of its parts", which he saw in the book as (ironically) reduced to "an idiotic travesty", "that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts". He also accused the authors of giving "ideology priority over truth", and of promoting a "bizarre conspiracy theory of science". Accusing them of lies and idiocy, he concluded that Not in Our Genes is "silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious". Psychologist David P. Barash wrote that Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin "unfairly lump sociobiology with racist eugenics and misguided Social Darwinism."
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