[Marxism] Richard Lewontin on Darwin

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NYR, Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Why Darwin?
By Richard C. Lewontin

Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography
by Janet Browne
Grove, 174 pp., $13.00 (paper)

The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin 
of Species
by Charles Darwin, annotated by James T. Costa
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 537 pp., $35.00

Why Evolution Is True
by Jerry A. Coyne
Viking, 282 pp., $27.95

It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is 
Making Us Sick
by Greg Gibson
FT Press, 187 pp., $24.99

When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the "Cleopatra's Nose" 
theory of history, so called after Pascal's remark in the Pensées : 
"Cleopatra's nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would 
have changed."[1] The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into 
the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that 
the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the 
necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef 
Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22694

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