My condolences to Prof. Levins's family. I wish, however, that Mehta had taken more space to discuss Levins's technical contributions. Or, failing that, at lea

My condolences to Prof. Levins's family. I wish, however, that Mehta had taken more space to discuss Levins's technical contributions. Or, failing that, at least defended his ideological writings to a point where the audience could seriously engage with them. For example, consider: > Thus, whether an organism is subject to something as universal and seemingly natural as the laws of gravity depends on its genes. In this way, they uprooted biological determinism’s intellectual foundation: the reductionist fallacy that it is possible to detach genes from environment. I'm having a lot of trouble following Mehta here. If an organism's genetics can determine its effective exposure to fundamental physical forces, isn't that actually quite a strong argument for "biological determinism"? The more serious objection here is that "biological determinism" is a term of derision applied to a group by its detractors. I suspect I am probably what Mehta would call a "biological determinist", but I have no idea why I should be chastened by the domination of gravitational force by thermal noise at the microscopic scale. The example has a "checkmate, biodeterminist!" air to it that makes me worry that at least one of us is missing something. Things begin to clear up in the next paragraph: > Levins’ scholarly critique of biological determinism was complemented by a deep commitment to radical scientific activism. It's not precisely clear how Mehta understands this complementarity, but should we take the suggestion that if Levins' "scholarly critique of biological determinism" turned out to be false, then his "deep commitment to radical scientific activism" might also be jeopardized? Might this help to explain the attitudes of Levins and his colleagues (notably Lewontin and Rose) towards their critics? The contributions of the "dialectical biologists" to these debates were extremely disappointing, rarely rising above the level of innuendo and deliberate misquotation. One gets the sense from these exchanges that they perceived stakes in the debate that simply weren't there (I mean, Trivers was a Black Panther for crying out loud) and consequently fought tooth and nail for any point whose concession might jeopardize The Cause. Later we have: > In passages that were scientifically decades ahead of their time, the book outlines a holistic way of looking at nature and the world — an outlook now fully embraced by the new fields of systems biology and complex systems... The point of The Dialectical Biologist was that Marxism is correct and current biology is insufficiently Marxist but once it becomes more Marxist things will turn out great. Putting aside the examples of every other time we've tried that, it's seriously tendentious to suggest that sys bio and complex systems have "fully embraced" these viewpoints, any more than optimal foraging theory vindicates the political economy of Jevons, Menger and Walras. Actually there's a way better case for the latter. Levins's collaborator Lewontin sunk to scarcely believable depths of intellectual dishonesty for such an accomplished scientist. I would have liked to be pleasantly surprised about Levins, but I'm afraid this article doesn't give me the means.