Carolina QuotesThe great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.
Richard Lewontin Connected to the Carolinas
Source
"The Last of the Nasties?," The New York Review of Books, 29 February 1996; — Review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton
- year
- 1996
Cite this record
“The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past wa…” Richard Lewontin. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-55D497EFFC. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/55d497effc
More from Richard Lewontin
The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ignores the large body of evidence about the actual complexity of the relationship between organisms and their resources.
The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.
To say that genetic differences are relevant to hetero- and homosexuality is not, however, to say that there are “genes for homosexuality” or even that there is a “genetic tendency to homosexuality.” This critical point can be illustrated by an example I owe to the philosopher of science, Elliott Sober. If we look at the chromosomes of people who knit and those who do not, we will find that with few exceptions, knitters have two X chromosomes, while people with one X and one Y chromosome almost never knit. Yet it would be absurd to say that we had discovered genes for knitting. The possession of two X chromosomes causes an embryo, with rare exceptions, to develop into an anatomical and physiological female, while the possession of a Y chromosome leads almost always to male development, and in our culture women are taught to knit while men are not. The beauty of this example is its historical (and geographical) contingency. Had we made the observations before the end of the eighteenth century (or even now in a few Irish, Scottish and Newfoundland communities), the result would have been reversed. Hand knitting was men’s work before the introduction of knitting machines around 1790, and was turned into a female domestic occupation only when mechanization made it economically marginal.