Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives is the second of two volumes of essays in honor of Harvard biologist Richard C. Lewontin. The first volume is Evolutionary Genetics: From Molecules to Morphology (Singh and Krimbas Reference Singh and Krimbas1999) which focuses on Lewontin's technical achievements in biology. The second volume explores Lewontin's contributions to historical, philosophical, and social studies of biology. The editors, Singh, Krimbas, Paul, and Beatty have collected a series of essays written by former students, postdocs, colleagues, and collaborators that reflect Lewontin's vast influence on the history, philosophy, and social studies of biology. The volume's first substantive essay is by Lewontin himself. An interview of Lewontin and twenty-six additional essays comprise the three main sections on historical, philosophical, and political aspects of biology.

Section A, on history of and in evolutionary biology, begins with an extended interview of Lewontin by Paul, Beatty, and Krimbas. Subsequent essays by Beatty, Ruvolo and Seielstad, and Singh explore issues in tightly connected with Lewontin's own work on the interplay of themes in Marxism and Darwinism, and human diversity. Essays by Gayon and Veuille on L'Héritier and Teissier's cage experiments and Paul and Spencer on eugenics are more loosely connected to Lewontin (containing, e.g., no citations to any of Lewontin's work), but nevertheless contain ideas inspired by Lewontin. The interview of Lewontin by Paul, Beatty, and Krimbas is one of the most important contributions to Thinking About Evolution. The interview traces Lewontin's experiences in all aspects of biology, from his years in Dobzhansky's laboratory at Columbia University, to North Carolina, to Rochester, NY to Chicago, and finally, to his years in his own laboratory at Harvard. Readers get Lewontin's perspectives on Dobzhansky, the ways he (Lewontin) has attacked the problematic of evolutionary genetics, as well as his insights on funding of evolutionary genetics research and the political economy of agriculture. The interview with Lewontin alone is worth the (high) price of the volume.

Section B, on philosophy of evolutionary biology, includes essays that explore sometimes subtle variations on philosophical problems introduced to philosophers of biology by Lewontin: the problems of adaptationism, the dialectic between organism and environment, reductionism, and the units of selection. The section is star-studded, with essays by Gray, Gould, Sarkar, Godfrey-Smith, Lloyd, Krimbas, Sober, Schank and Wimsatt, Brandon, Piattelli-Palmarini, and Taylor. Lloyd's “Units and Levels of Selection: An Anatomy of the Units of Selection Debates” is a standout. She traces the debates back to their philosophical roots in Lewontin's, “Units of Selection” (Lewontin Reference Lewontin1970) and deftly dissects numerous scientific and philosophical sources for the central questions and answers discussed through the heyday of the debates during the 1980's. Lloyd's work here is the most original and interesting of any recent work on the units of selection.

The volume concludes with Section C, on the politics of evolutionary biology. Lewontin's influence in this area is as strong as it is in the history and philosophy of biology. He has had a direct impact on the social dimensions of genetic determinism generally, the reduction of neurobiological and behavioral traits to genes more specifically, and on agricultural economics to name but a few of his contributions. Here, as in Section A, essays are more and less tightly connected to Lewontin's work. The key essays, those that are closely connected to Lewontin, are those by Kitcher, Rose, Vandermeer, and Berlan. Readers see clearly Lewontin's influence on the politics of biology. In his piece “Battling the Undead: How (and How Not) to Resist Genetic Determinism” Kitcher, importantly, remarks that “[n]obody has done more to combat genetic determinism than Richard Lewontin…” (396). And Vandermeer in his “The Agroecosystem: The Modern Vision in Crisis, the Alternative Evolving” says that “Lewontin crystallized the defining feature of modern agriculture: ‘Farming is growing peanuts on the land; agriculture is making peanut butter from petroleum’” (480, quoting Lewontin Reference Lewontin1982). It is amazing that a single biologist could have had such influence in such disparate areas of biology.

There is only one disappointing aspect of Thinking About Evolution. Apart from Lewontin's own discussion in his interview, there is no historical or philosophical exploration of his gel electrophoresis work (e.g., Hubby and Lewontin Reference Hubby and Lewontin1966; Lewontin and Hubby Reference Lewontin and Hubby1966; Lewontin Reference Lewontin1991). Lewontin's pioneering use of gel electrophoresis to study genetic variation at the molecular level is important in the history and philosophy of biology, at least for its revolutionary impact on studies of molecular evolution, if not for its influence on the practice (and funding) of evolutionary genetics more generally.

Ultimately, Thinking About Evolution is an important volume of essays in history, philosophy, and social studies of biology. Lewontin is one of the most influential contemporary biologists in these fields. Indeed, across the three sections of the volume, discussions of dialectic are pervasive. Perhaps the central lesson historians, philosophers, and sociologists of biology have learned from Lewontin is the extent of the tensions between interacting factors in all dimensions of biology. Whatever the most valuable lesson learned from Lewontin, Thinking About Evolution gives the fields of history, philosophy, and social studies of biology a perspective on just how he has helped shape them.